I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  In the meantime, the band had changed its identity even more often than its players. No one had liked the Wild Frontiers, and even Mrs. Crockett went off it after a while. So, for no reason, they became Black Coffee (“the whitest group I know,” said the DJ at the school disco). Then Jetlag. Then Eagle, in tribute to the lunar module, just after the moon landings. (“If we had stuck with it,” David would say, pretty much every month ever since, in the pub, “we could have waited till the Eagles were famous, then sued them for stealing our name.” “But they’re plural,” Bill would reply. “That’s different. And there’s that the.” It was, he often thought, the most pointless conversation of his career.) Then Mandrake Root, once the second Colin was in place. Then, very briefly, the Stitches (the idea being that, at the close of a triumphant career, they could release a Greatest Hits album titled The Stitches: In Time). And now they were Spirit Level, and, as Bill announced with something more than modesty to anyone who would listen, they were still as bad and unfocused as they had been when Mrs. Crockett gave them all a slice of Battenberg, with a cake fork each. Names could come and go, talent could rise and fall, but Spirit Level were, and always would be, underperformers. Their cover version of “All Right Now,” repeated, yet unrefined, over many drunken weddings, still sounded, as Bill had confided to a friend at university, “like a double-decker bus running over a herd of cows.” The band was the one dependable constant in his life, but it was more than that. It was—though he would never admit as much to himself, let alone to Ruth—his one true love.

  “Gorget.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Gorget.” Zelda held out the sheet of paper. She had swanned by, seen Bill sipping a cup of coffee and plucked the letter from his typewriter, with a zipping sound. “Typo near the end. You’ve got gorget instead of forget. And you haven’t signed it.”

  “I think they’ll know who it’s from.”

  “Don’t you be too sure,” said Zelda, who looked as if she might at any moment wag a finger at him. “The boy we had before you, no, two before you, not counting the pervert, he once finished a letter from David and signed it Brian.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that was his name, silly. He was so … into it, as you might say, that he forgot who was who.”

  “Like Method.”

  “I beg your pardon?” To Zelda, the word sounded suspicious, as if it might be connected with sex.

  “Nothing,” said Bill. “So was he the pervert?”

  “No, the perv—Look, I don’t have time for this sort of, of, tittle-tattle.” Zelda was flushed. “Please just make the corrections.”

  “What did he perv about?”

  “William, really, I have far better things to do … If you could just go through this one more time.”

  “So it’s all right, then?”

  “A lovely piece of work, just lovely.” Zelda was on safer ground now. “I particularly like the part about him being a medieval minstrel. Very … imaginative.”

  “Well, he said something about that once himself. I’m just following his lead. I’m not really, you know, making it up. Am I?” he went on, more in blank pleading than in curiosity.

  “You’re doing an excellent job. Much better than Brian, who, if he had a fault, did rather let the whole thing go to his head.”

  “In what way? Did he start wearing the kit?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You know, the catsuit? The shell necklace? Did he wear it here, at this desk? On a Tuesday?”

  Zelda chose not to reply. She merely picked up a bottle of Tipp-Ex and handed it to Bill. “Correct.” And with that she moved on.

  The top of the Tipp-Ex had stuck tight. Bill twisted it, swore and twisted again. It flew off, and a blurt of white liquid flew over Bill’s right hand and up his wrist. Chas, as if on cue, picked this instant to stroll past.

  “Filthy little bugger. Right where everyone can see.”

  “Sorry?”

  Chas wheezed and cackled, like the sidekick of a stage villain, and slunk toward the Gents. Bill sat there, wiping his wet hands. The phone rang, and he reached for it. As he took hold of the receiver, the cradle popped unstuck, with a faint squelching sound, and fell off the edge of the desk.

  “Sod. This,” said Bill, very loudly. “Soddit.” The phone was covered in correcting fluid, so he just said, “Sorry,” and dropped the receiver on the floor, where it went on squawking for a while. Using his left hand, he fed the sheet of paper back into the typewriter, rolled it down and, with a single finger, stabbed the word David. “And sod you,” he said, again out loud. “Little prick.”

  “Who you talking to?” said the man he didn’t know, a couple of desks away.

  “No one.”

  The man gave a quick, jeering grin. “Rock never sleeps, eh?”

  Bill had run out of the strength to be angry. He just looked over and sighed.

  “More like pop never wakes up,” said the man. He laughed at his own joke, and lowered his head to his work. The rain outside was thicker now: angry but bereft of rhythm, like the drumming of Colin Hobbs. Suddenly, Bill had no desire to make music among friends. He wanted to go to sleep.

  The squawking wouldn’t stop. Bill retrieved the phone from under his feet. “Yes?”

  “William, it’s Zelda.” This was not good. Zelda’s office was only twenty seconds away, and, as a rule, she liked to launch herself through the gap in the potted-plant partition and cruise around the desks of her colleagues. The other day, Bill had introduced her to the phrase shooting the breeze, which had never come her way before—Zelda’s language, and indeed her world, stopped short at the frontier of the Home Counties—and she had mulled it over, tasting the words, and pronounced at last, “I like that.” From now on, if there was a breeze to be shot, she would shoot it; and the only thing to keep her from shooting was unwelcome news. When forced to bear bad tidings, she would deliver them over the phone.

  “William, I’m so sorry. There has been an editorial meeting”—that meant she and Roy had shared the scrapings from the end of a jar of Coffee-mate—“and it has been decided to bring the quiz forward to the next issue. As you may know, we were planning to run it for our readers in midsummer, but now that David has announced his dates, we feel the time has come—”

  “What quiz?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, really.” This was even worse than Bill had thought.

  “What quiz?” he asked again.

  “Well, seeing how many fans of David’s read our magazine, which as you know is the premier publication on the subject—”

  “What quiz?”

  “The Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz. Two pages, highly specialized, not just for the passing girl in the street. The kinds of things only real fans would know. So Roy and I thought, in fact we pretty much decided, that you have shown such dedication to your work, and already know so much about David, that you would be the obvious—”

  “When by?”

  “Monday.”

  “No.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Can’t be done. All that research …”

  “Yes, well, it will mean putting in a little extra work, and we fully realize—”

  “I can’t do the weekend.”

  “And that,” said Zelda, triumphant in her logic, “is why I am calling you now. So that you can make a really super start on it right away. I shall be working late, too, and so will Peter of the Photographic Department.”

  “Late?”

  “And I thought, if we’re all done by nine or ten, we could all three pop round the corner to the Odyssey Grill. Company treat, courtesy of Roy. Super squid. Very generous, I think you’ll agree.”

  “But this evening was …”

  “Was what, dear?” There was a pause. Bill was dumb.

  “Well, whatever it was, I’m sure you can do it another time.” Zelda was speaking brightly now, through the worst of it and hurrying to a close. “Thank you so much. Knew we could rel
y on you. Layout will stop by in just a mo and have a word.”

  The phone went dead. Bill put it down. He didn’t know what he dreaded more: calling David Crockett to say he couldn’t make band practice, or eating late-night, badly kebabbed goat with Pete the Pimple. Both had to be done, in any case; to turn down Zelda’s demands, this early in his career at Worldwind, could mean no career at all. A tempting thought, in many ways; but he was saving for a car, and a trip to Greece with Ruth, and though he couldn’t name his future, or give it any form or shape, he knew that he wanted one. Anything but time hanging heavy as iron in his hands.

  Bill dug for a handkerchief and blew his nose. He reached for the phone again, but it rang as he touched it. He jumped and snatched it, half in anger.

  “Yes, what?”

  “Forgive me, William, this is Zelda again. I forgot to add the really important bit. Something to put at the top. If you could, you know, make it a bit splashy. You can do poetic, of all people.”

  “Yes?” He found himself crouching forward, as if for a fight.

  “Top prize for this quiz of yours.” It was his quiz, already?

  “Go on.”

  “Well, normally we give away records or posters or tickets and so forth, but on this occasion, what with it being so special, the lucky winner and a friend will get to meet David himself on the set of The Partridge Family.”

  “That’s lucky?”

  “Come now. Picture yourself as a girl of thirteen. Imagine how thrilled you’d be.”

  “I can just imagine.”

  Just.

  7

  The Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz dominated our lives in the days leading up to White City. Sharon and I gave every spare minute we had to it. We dragged all our scrapbooks and shoeboxes out from under her bed; the layer of dust on them felt like suede. Spring was going absolutely nuts that year, bustin’ out all over like the song says, and the weather was so warm the little heater that smelled of burned hair had been put away. Both windows in Sharon’s pink room were thrown wide open and we stripped to our cap-sleeved T-shirts, kneeling on the carpet as we combed through thousands of cuttings, some of them as familiar as our own family photographs. I liked to think of us going about our task like an army that knows it is in a state of battle readiness. So this was it, the moment we had been training for. Our devotion to David was being put to the test. We would vanquish our enemies, like Annette Smith, who told Jackie magazine she had 9,345 pix of David. Huh. Those of us who were in possession of every single issue of The Essential David Cassidy Magazine, including the rare, limited-edition, special commemorative birthday supplement of April 1973, had nothing to fear from show-offs from Sevenoaks, wherever that was. Defeat was unthinkable. Mrs. Lewis brought us Pepsi and Jacob’s crackers and cheese to keep up our strength.

  Summer took us by surprise. The candles on the horse chestnuts flared overnight. Gillian’s group had already left the science corridor and moved to its meeting place beneath them, at the far end of the playing fields. It was the best spot to pretend to be ignoring the boys from. With superb disdain, we watched—or deliberately looked away—as the lads booted the ball over the posts, ducked and dived and generally pretended to be Barry John or Gareth Edwards, who had gone to school in Pontardawe, just a few miles up the road. Only the year before, our local hero had scored the greatest try in all rugby history at Cardiff Arms Park. Many centuries later, creatures in far galaxies would still be hearing the shout of joy our town gave that afternoon in 1973. Ours was a small country, and a poor one, but when I was a child we always felt rich because men like Gareth Edwards were on our side. Until the day he died, my father loved to quote the match commentator, imitating the exact quiver of pride in his voice: “If the greatest writer of the written word had written that story, no one would have believed it.”

  So, secretly, we watched the rugby boys from under the cover of the trees. I was still madly in love with David and counting the days till I met him in London: what I couldn’t know was that things would soon change.

  At break time, Sharon and I lay in the dappled shade, propped up on our elbows, scouring the magazines she brought into school in a carrier bag. We were getting very close. Only four answers out of the forty still eluded us.

  “I know I’ve seen David’s signet ring mentioned somewhere,” said Sharon, ticking another mag off our master checklist.

  “What do you get if you win?” asked Olga, who had just gotten back with Angela from the snack machine and handed out the cold drinks and the chocolate.

  “Pet and me are going to Los Angeles to hang out with David on the set of The Partridge Family,” announced Sharon with total conviction in her voice.

  “Geroff. You two’re never going to Los Angeles,” Carol objected with a loud, prolonged raspberry. She was sunbathing flat on her back a few feet away, her blouse tucked into her bra, her skirt tucked into her knickers and her legs akimbo. The boys were looking over at her like jackals watching an antelope.

  “We are going to Los Angeles,” said Sharon. “We’ve got only four more answers to go.”

  Olga handed me a Curly Wurly. I tried to break it neatly in half to share with Sharon, but the center was rock hard. I kept twisting until the coating shattered, exposing the caramel skeleton within, and sending splinters of chocolate all over my clothes. I licked my finger and used the damp tip to collect the chocolate pieces, one by one, before handing Sharon the bigger piece with a flourish.

  “Even if you get all the answers right, statistically it’s very unlikely you’ll win,” said Olga, who, even then, was not one of life’s dreamers.

  “Yeah, millions of girls will enter,” taunted Carol.

  Angela said that her cousin Joanna, who we would meet in London, was entering.

  “This isn’t just any old quiz.” Sharon was exasperated at their sheer ignorance. “It’s like an A-level in David Cassidy,” she said. “Even if you think you know David backward, it’s really, really hard. Anyway, Pet’s come up with something fabulous for the tiebreaker. The mag said that the fan who writes the winning tiebreaker must display a certain Johnny. What’s it again, Petra?”

  “What?”

  “What’s that saying. I don’t know what?”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “French. You know. Johnny says something.”

  “Je ne sais quoi.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What is Petra’s tiebreaker, anyway?” Gillian rolled over on the grass, turning her back on Stuart and the rugby. Through lowered eyelashes she had been surveying her prey, but now, once again, we girls were briefly of interest to her.

  “Not telling.” Sharon laughed with a flash of defiance. “It’s our secret. Petra’s and mine. We’ll send you lot a postcard from Beverly Wilshire if yer lucky.”

  “Who’s Beverly Wilshire when she’s at home?” demanded Carol.

  Sharon caught my eye and we burst out laughing. I suddenly realized what the unfamiliar feeling was I’d been struggling to put a name to. I was happy. It wasn’t just the horse chestnuts that were full of surging hope. We were going to win the quiz, but, better than that, I had begun to be accepted for who I was, maybe even liked, one of the best feelings you can have. Had Gillian sensed it? Did she decide there and then to take it away from me?

  Just because she could.

  When you first start learning the cello, the sound you make is raspy and tuneless. This instrument is a challenge. It hurts your fingers and leaves bright red points on the tips. I cried. My mother told me I must persevere. Her Aunt Petra had been a cellist in Berlin. Aunt Petra made a sound so beautiful, she said, it made the whole family cry. I wondered what it would be like to make my mother cry. The skin on my fingers grew hard. I persevered.

  Miss Fairfax was my cello teacher. My best teacher, but also the weirdest. She had short gray hair, and a whiskery, wrinkled face, and she was one of those people who are so old it’s hard to tell whether they’re a man or a lady. She taught
Latin as well as music, but no one listened. In class, Jimmy Lo said that Miss Fairfax looked like a tortoise in a wig. Even as I was laughing along with everyone else, I knew it was a terrible betrayal. She deserved better from me. In fact, she deserved everything I had to give. People said Miss Fairfax lost her fiancé in the Great War, which was so long ago that she couldn’t possibly still be alive. She played the cello in London for a long time, in a quartet that appeared at the Wigmore Hall. I’d seen a poster in a frame at her house. JANE FAIRFAX: CELLO.

  After I passed Grade 8 when I was twelve, she said: “Now, Petra, we are entering another country.” She didn’t mention the country’s name. But once she’d introduced me to the Bach cello suites, I think I knew it was the country I wanted to live in.

  Before I got in with Gillian’s group, I used to practice at least two or three hours a day. I had not been practicing hard enough for the Princess Margaret concert and Miss Fairfax knew it.

  “Your cello is not a donkey, Petra. It’s a racehorse. I want to hear that cello resonating. At the moment, that poor cello is very glum and sad.” Miss Fairfax pulled a tragic-clown face.

  Her downturned mouth, with all the wrinkles around it, was like a drawstring purse. I thought, That is what she will look like when she is dead.