I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  “Together,” said Zelda, brightly, “they spell out—”

  “Yes, I geddit.” Bill considered the socks. To his surprise, he had not yet ceased to be surprised by the madness of Cassidy love. David was still basically a kid, and the likelihood of his ever being allowed to become a man seemed slimmer by the day; either he would be torn asunder by his fans, like a stag among hounds, or else he would be frozen in eternal youth, the way that rich Californians had their corpses stowed in dry ice. And he couldn’t sing—not like Jagger, anyway, or Bowie, or any of the grown-up gods. Next to Cassidy, even Marc Bolan was a proper adult male, and he wore eye shadow, for God’s sake. And a feather boa. But—and the thought of this niggled Bill, and wouldn’t go away—you had to hand it to the Cassidy guy: he could stir up love. He was like a witch with a cauldron. Bill had fancied, at college, that he knew a bit about love—not as a condition of the heart (God help him), but as a tactic that poets and painters used, an artist’s strategy for getting women into bed, or getting yourself into their heads. But this boy, this American pansy, he could manufacture an emotion out of nowhere, out of nothing, and sort of squash it into a song, like Clare Possit’s cramming socks into that brown box. And when the girls unwrapped it at the other end—when they heard it, alone in their bedrooms—they not only believed it, they believed he had believed it in the first place; they even believed it was directed specifically at them.

  The fools, the uncountable fools. Shakespeare had his Dark Lady, maybe a bloke on the side, but how many could David win over with one verse, one yelp of that watery voice, one sideways nudge of the bum? Millions of them, tens of millions of Clares and Judiths and Christines, all utterly convinced that they were cherished, both che’d and rish’d; that they were in love, as you might be in Shrewsbury or Wigan or Weston-super-Mare, but also, in return, that they were loved. Pop ruled the world. Poets were left for dust.

  “Zit city.”

  He came out of his reverie with a start. For an instant, his head spun. Pete was beside him, pushing a picture into his frame of vision. Where was Zelda? While Bill was dreaming, she must have sailed away.

  “Look at that.” Pete poked at something with his finger, which was gray with graphite at the tip; he had flecks of white in the nail, too, which Bill’s grandmother used to say was evidence of a bad diet. Well, she got that right. Two days ago, Bill had seen Pete force a Kit Kat into the hollowed-out crust of a Cornish pasty, and then eat the whole thing. Had he already eaten the meat and veg from the middle, or simply scooped them out with his slaty fingers and thrown them away? And here he was, bent over, rich of breath, showing Bill a photograph. No, two photographs.

  “Before and after,” he said. “Like one of them weight wanker ads.” He sniffed hard and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “Normally I wouldn’t take a copy, you know, just tart up the one. But this was so good I thought you ought to see the original, before I got to work. You being new and everything.”

  For all Bill knew, that may have been a kindly offer, wise counsel from an old hand, but somehow it came out sounding like an insult. So did everything that dripped from the lips of Pete.

  “Afters first.” It was a black-and-white head shot of David Cassidy; his back was to the camera but he had turned round, coy as a deer, glancing over his shoulder to tell the world’s females to come hither. Or, if they were minded, just to come. Sex must get in there somewhere. His lashes, with their graceful curve, were absurdly long—could they be forever?—and his skin was as flawless as a saucer of milk.

  “Okay, now what? It’s a girly-boy.”

  “Now look at her.” Pete gave a terrible grin, and slid another image into view. “Before.” Bill looked.

  “Oh Jesus.”

  Every teenager had spots, but this guy had a problem. His erupting, pitted cheeks might have aroused the professional curiosity of a vulcanologist.

  “Jesus,” Bill repeated. “It’s like looking at the moon.” Then, realizing that praise would be in order, he turned to Pete. “Great job, mate. Magic wand and all that. Cassidy doesn’t know you, but he bloody well needs you.”

  “Fuck off,” Pete said, to indicate that he was pleased.

  “How d’you do it?”

  “Ink, whitener, chronic little brush. Pencil and rubber, sometimes. You kind of … stipple over the bumps.”

  Without ado, wary of talking about his art, or anything that might smack of art, he pulled the images from Bill’s grasp and marched off. He had come over to show off his handiwork, received due credit, yet gone away angrier than he had come. Like many workers in the office, Pete conducted himself like a sour, superannuated child. Was that the fault of management, Bill asked himself, or was it just the job—the inevitable result of spending too much time up to your neck in other people’s adolescent dreams?

  The phone rang. It was beige, all angles instead of curves, and too light to stay in one place. Bill picked up the receiver, and the cradle, responding to his tug, fell off the edge of the desk.

  “Shit,” said Bill, very loudly. Zelda, who was passing, gave him a stern look. Other people could purse only their lips, but she could do it with her whole face.

  “Don’t swear,” said a voice on the other end of the line.

  “Who is this?” Bill asked. “Oh, Ruth, hi. No, sorry, I dropped the, hang on, wait a sec.”

  He retrieved the cradle and tried to balance it on a pile of letters. “No, it’s not a bad time at all. I just—Yes. Yes, fine. Sorry?”

  Zelda had stopped now, and was watching him struggle with the phone. Suddenly she stuck out her tongue.

  “Christ,” said Bill. “Sorry, no, love. It’s just Zelda’s doing something with her tongue. No, her tongue. Zelda. She’s my—Sorry? No, my boss …”

  Zelda had put one finger to her mouth, pretended to lick it, then used it to make little swirling motions in the air. Bill didn’t know where to look. Why was his immediate superior choosing this moment, above all, to offer what looked like intimate sexual services? Did she bear a grudge against Ruth? Neither of these options seemed likely. The week before, after all, Zelda had refused a Cadbury Flake on the grounds that it was “a bit rude.”

  “No, love, I’m, I’m, I’m busy with—tour schedules, setting up interviews. Yes. Who with? Oh, you know, big names. No, not that big. I mean not yet.”

  He was conscious of starting to squirm. Zelda was looking at him oddly, still doing something unfathomable with her hand.

  “No, but God I’d love to. Or Jimmy Page. Yeah, I know. You know they banned the last album in Spain? Cos of the kids on the front? Yeah, I know …”

  Bill watched as Zelda reached out and took the cradle of the Trimphone from the paper pile. The letter on top had the legend I HATE LITTLE JIMMY OSMOND pasted down the side in blue Dymo tape. Zelda licked her finger again, turned the phone over, then used her fingertip to moisten the round rubber feet on its base. Finally, she cleared a patch of space on Bill’s desk and plunked the cradle down, firmly pressing until it stuck. “There,” she said, with pride, and walked off, singing, in her deep, vibrating alto, “Stair-air-way to heh-uh-ven.” Bill put his head in his hands, the phone against his skull. Dimly he was aware that Ruth was still talking. Her voice hummed in his head.

  “Mm, yup. Well, I’m meeting the boys after work. What? You know, the other guys.”

  He lowered his head, sneaked a glance around the immediate area, sank his voice to a whisper. “The band. What? I am speaking up. I said the band.” Someone two desks away looked up. Nobody he knew, a newcomer holding a giant stapler—but still, couldn’t be too careful.

  “No, I’ll be done around nine thirty, ten,” Bill continued, voice back to normal now. “Yeah, the Grapes. See you then. Better go. Oh, you know. Rock never sleeps and all that. Yep. Okay, bye.”

  Bill tipped his head back and thought about Ruth for a while. Outside, the sunlight had paled, and showers tapped on the window. The office was growing darker, but the lights hadn’t been turned on;
not because of the note that had circulated last week, warning of electricity costs, but because no one could be bothered to reach for a switch. Some of them, like Chas, openly preferred the gloom.

  Bill bent to his keyboard again and became another person. He wrote of his sun worship, and how he couldn’t live without his musical instruments (“if anyone wanted to torture me, they’d only have to take away my drums and guitar”), and apologized for his raggedy scrawl. Then he stopped and counted the words he had produced so far. Eleven hundred and thirty. Perfect. Should he be proud, as a journalist, or ashamed, as a man, to bring the stuff in like this—on time, to length, right on the button? Just room for a sign-off: “Don’t gorget … Keep a place warm for me in your hearts till I can get there to fill it. Till then, Love—”

  He was aware of a shadow moving in front of him, around him to his back, but so rapt was he in the act of impersonation that he couldn’t be bothered to look up. So it came as a shock when four words were breathed beside his neck, in a low growl.

  “Let me fill it.”

  Bill jumped, half up, half backward, trying to halt the spinning in his head. “Whawha,” he said.

  “Sorry, cock,” said Roy, mightily pleased by the effect of his interruption. The publisher had come to call.

  “No, sorry, my fault,” said Bill, struggling to his feet, like an old man in a pub being introduced to a girl. Why had today, which hadn’t started too badly, ended in a litter of apologies? “Sorry, you were saying …”

  “I was sayying,” Roy went on, in the leery tone that he preserved for slower, younger employees, “that you ain’t seen nothing, son. Your pretty boy there, Mr. Cassidy, butter wouldn’t melt, but they say he melts all over the shop, them little ladies sticking their faces through his gate.”

  “Surely not. He’s not like that,” Bill replied, unexpectedly turning into his own grandmother.

  “Anyway, now you’ll have a chance to find out, won’t you? Cos Mr. Squeaky Clean is coming to dirty old England—”

  “Yes, I know. We have tickets.”

  “Ah, but you have tickets to the concert, sonny Jim. I’m talking about the press conference before. And not just that. I’m talking about you and Mr. Maytime, head to head, top to toe, just the pair of you, fifteen lovely minutes. You and Cassidy, alone together in a hotel room. There are girls in this country, let me tell you—there are girls at the North bloody Pole who would give their furry knickers for one minute with that nancy in a hotel suite. And you get a quarter of an hour, my son. Don’t waste it. Not queer, are you?”

  “I—”

  “Good. Cos I’m not sending a poofter to see the bloke when all our readers want to snog him, am I? Don’t want you putting your grubby mitts down his brown clothes, do we now?”

  “Come off it, Mr.—”

  “All right, all right. You’re doing a grand job, anyway. Born to it. Just don’t ask him what he really thinks or any of that arty bollocks. Nothing about his soul. Doubt if the poor bugger’s got time for it, anyway.”

  “Time for what?”

  “A soul. He’s just a voice in a shirt, isn’t he? And he can’t be arsed to do the buttons up. Like some people I could mention.” And, with that, Roy idled away, making a chewing sound. Bill surreptitiously reached a hand to his chest and did up one of the buttons. He knew what the boss thought of him. Roy, he knew full well, looked at him and saw a fancy-pants: a smartarse with a poncey shirt and a college degree (as if that was any use), a hireling too scared of life to get his nose into it, too innocent to admit what happens when, as in Roy’s favorite and much-repeated phrase, “pop shit hits the fans.”

  He was probably right. All the same, Bill didn’t know what to believe about someone like David Cassidy; he didn’t know what to want to believe. In idle moments, maybe with Ruth asleep at his side, he had wondered what went on when a male of twenty-four years found himself on the receiving end of mass adoration; what literally went on, not in the young guy’s head, but in his bed and at his feet, in hotels and swimming pools and the green rooms of stadiums and television shows. When the worshippers met the boy-god, what was the likely result? Did they swoon or shy away, like the heroines of romantic fiction, unable to bear the fantasy made flesh; or did unromantic fact get the better of them, and force them to their knees?

  Bill had heard the rumors about David, couldn’t exactly avoid them, yet something in him chose not to listen: something not just prim and prudish, but protective of the rights of dreamers everywhere.

  He must have spent years of his life, after all, thinking about Paul McCartney—not about being McCartney, or becoming McCartney, but holding fast, nonetheless, to an image of Paul somewhere there beside him, larky and quick, showing him the fingering on “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and egging him onward: “Aright, mate, take your time, no hurry. That sounds great, Bill, I can see you’ve been practicing.”

  And if Bill had stood there, dreaming of that nonsense, and knowing in his guts that the nonsense made sense, more sense than anything else; well, then what right did he have to mock the silly girls, knitting their DC sweaters and sending their poems and their locks of hair?

  “Tread softly, William, for you tread on their dreams.” Zelda’s words, which, at the time they were uttered, had made him choke on a Polo mint, came back to him with the full chiding gentleness of their speaker.

  He looked at his watch. Almost three o’clock. Two more hours and he’d be done. In three hours’ time, if Zelda didn’t try to keep him late, and if the Tube wasn’t clogged, and if he could manage to grab a quick scotch beforehand to steady his nerves, and his fingers—all being well, come six o’clock, the music journalist would make music of his own.

  Bill played bass in Spirit Level. They were not a well-known band, even to their extended families. Nor would they ever be well-known, not unless they were accidentally caught up in a hostage drama, or played a heroic role in evacuating a pub during a bomb scare, or were, indeed, bombed themselves. That would be bloody typical, wouldn’t it? To achieve immortality instead of fame, selling truckloads of records on the back of having died. All those groupies, wandering round in a daze of admiration, and no one to sleep with …

  They had formed at school. “You’re still a bunch of schoolboys, aren’t you?” Ruth had said, on the single, deeply ill-advised occasion when he had invited her to a gig. They had played for twenty minutes above the Duke of York’s in Acton, and Ruth had stood there, shandy in hand, immobile; never had a human being, Bill thought, been less stirred into deep, liberating rhythms by the pulse of popular music. She hadn’t even blinked. Afterward, once they had trudged off to make way for Space Hopper or Spikenard or whoever else was up next, he had sipped his pint and, summoning his courage, asked what she had thought.

  “What can I say?” she asked in return, with rather too wide a smile, and the phrase had hung over his head, ever since, like a double-edged sword. But she was right about one thing: they were kids, still. Not just adults reliving their youth, which would have been sad enough, considering what youth was like, but adults using the weaponry of youth—shouting, singing, arguing, mucking around—to pretend that they could fend off the unwanted responsibilities of adult life.

  The lead singer was called David Crockett. People would come up to him after a gig and say, “What’s your name again?” and he would answer, “David Crockett.”

  “No, your real name.”

  “Crockett, really. David Crockett.” Then, without exception, they would say, “Oh, piss off,” and turn away, with a shake of the head.

  At school it had been different; everyone knew his name, and the band had decided not to conceal the fact but, more cunningly, to make it their selling point. “You could be David Crockett and the Wild Frontiers,” said Mrs. Crockett, his unflappable mother, as they sat at her kitchen table one afternoon. She always insisted on David, not Davy, which—or so Bill believed—made it slightly harder to maintain the pose of American pioneers. Tolworth was a long
way from Oklahoma. It lacked a Gold Rush, for one thing. The suburb was on the southwesterly fringes of London, clinging to the capital’s hem.

  They had all been upstairs at the Crocketts’, discussing the swiftness of their path to glory, now that Derek, a psycho in waiting, but also the best guitarist in the school, had joined the band. Their first number one would enter the charts in “early April ’71,” according to the drummer, Colin Hobbs, who was the best at math. Mrs. Crockett had knocked on the bedroom door, put her head round and said brightly, “Tea and Battenberg when you’re ready, boys!” They had interrupted the conversation about private jets and dutifully trooped downstairs, like Scouts.

  Bill didn’t know where the original band members were these days. After school, where everyone was afraid of him, Derek had started to run up against kids—young men—who bore just as much resentment as he did, for reasons that none of them could grasp, let alone sort out. In the winter of 1970, just as Bill was starting to think about the use of kissing in Keats, Derek had gotten into a fight at Wimbledon Station. The other boy had ended up on the tracks, with half his chin scraped off, and only just scrambled free. Derek had gotten eighteen months in a place for young offenders and none of them heard from him again. Bill worried about him sometimes, late at night.

  Derek’s guitar case might have had two Stanley knives Sellotaped to the inside, but, of all the pupils who tried, and failed, to play the weepy Harrison riff from “Something,” Derek failed least. But he had vanished from their lives, and—more important—from their lineup, and his place had gone to Colin Dougall, who smoked more weed than anyone Bill had ever met, often appearing from a kind of cloud, but who was also the only person he knew who still went to church. The combination seemed unlikely, or plain wrong, although drummer Colin had some elaborate theory about the warm front of cannabis meeting the moist air of incense, and it starting to rain in the nave. Colin Hobbs’s problem, apart from being clever, was that he was called Colin, and, as David pointed out, you couldn’t have a band with two Colins in it. Everyone accepted the logic of this argument, even Colin Hobbs, who went off to Southampton and became, so his mother said, “very into computers.” His place, behind the drum kit, had gone to John Priscumbe, who was too young, then to Michael “Stinky” Sturrock, who smelled, then to a creature called, simply, Brillo, who had lasted a week, and finally, to everyone’s relief, to a solid Lancastrian, Geoff Hymes, who had come to London to make his fortune and wound up mending fridges in Maida Vale. No one could call him a great drummer, and nobody did, but he was genial, and punctual, and, best of all, every other weekend, he had the use of a Ford Transit.