The other girl suddenly spoke, the one whose head he had bumped into. One arm of her glasses was mended with masking tape.
“You haven’t done David, have you?”
There was a pause. The crowd ebbed and surged around them, with Bill stuck there like a lighthouse. The sensible thing, of course, was to deny everything, to brush the whole question aside; who knew how these girls would react if he told them anything else? It wouldn’t just be vain to say he had met the man; it might be dangerous.
“Three days ago,” he said.
He didn’t know that human beings could explode. He knew that they could shout, howl, hurl their wrath against the heavens; he knew that some people, once they start laughing or wailing, find it impossible to stop; but this was different. This was like a land mine. The girls flung their hands to the sides of their heads, as if trying to stop their skulls from bursting wide; they stared at him in what might, from a distance, have looked like horror; and they screamed. Christ, did they scream. All that breath, in those still-unfinished lungs …
“Oh my God, oh my Gaaaahhdd!” Other girls skewed round and looked at them, then at Bill, feeling the heat of the mania as it spread. He was already regretting having spoken. That would teach him for telling the truth.
“This bloke met Day-vid,” cried the girl in the yellow sweater. Instantly the gabble doubled its strength, poured in his direction.
“What was it like what was he wearing did he have his guitar did he smell nice did he have snacks were they American ones did he have Twinkles they’re called Twinkies you dozy cow was he wearing jewelry did he have a necklace on any rings please don’t tell us he had rings …”
Bill was backing away, but they pawed at him—not at him, he was no more than a vessel, but it felt as though they wanted to scrape off any residue of David that might have clung to him. Half a thumbprint would do. One girl with braids reached out and clamped a palm against his, saying, “If I shake your hand, and you shook his …” Then she took her hand away and held it tenderly against her cheek. Another had an autograph book open and was holding out a pen, with a rubbery “Love Is” figure stuck on the end. No one had ever asked him for an autograph when he played for Spirit Level, that was for sure, though some pub landlords would make him sign for drinks before the gig, so that none of the band tried to sneak any pints for free.
Bill looked around, just to check that nobody he had ever known, loved, worked for, spoken to, lived with or slept with was in sight. But all he could see were the heads and shoulders of juvenile strangers, so he turned back, took the pen and quickly signed his name on the yellow page, using what he hoped was the kind of wild flourish that you would get from a rock star, or from someone who had met a rock star, once. The braids girl took back the book and looked at the scrawl, then up at Bill.
“What’s your name?”
“Bill.”
“Doesn’t look like Bill. Looks like number eighty-seven.” The girl next to her peered at it, too. “Written by a spaz,” she added helpfully.
Bill gave a weak smile, the smile that drinkers give just before they begin to throw up and withdraw from the scene. Somewhere there was a barrier, the obvious frontier point, which divided the press corps from the fans, but to find it would mean charging forward, head down; the better option was the more illogical one—to reverse through the ranks, exit through the entrance and make his way round the outside of the stadium to another gate. Bill chose the second route and ceased to struggle. Instead, he took a long breath, let himself fall backward into the throng and kept on falling. Bodies kept him upright, more or less, and momentum kept him going. Somewhere music struck up, urgent and voiceless. Somebody gave him a hug and passed him on. Sometimes you can save yourself by drowning.
8:11 p.m. “Excuse me, that’s my head. Excuse me, please get off me, please.”
I was used to rough handling from my mother, but this was the first time I’d been used as a stepladder. A girl with long red hair had one boot wedged in my cheek, the other was blocking my ear, which I barely noticed anyway because I couldn’t hear anything, the screaming was that loud. I tried to shake the girl off, but there was no room to shake in. I could barely move my body an inch either way, so I tried to rear up backward and unseat my passenger, like I’d seen the horses do on Mam and Tad’s farm. The girl dug in her heels and stood upright on the shoulders that, until a short while ago, had belonged to me and me alone.
“David, I want your baby,” the stranger on my shoulders wailed, swaying from side to side.
“Geroff, you dirty bitch,” Carol said, punching the redhead in the backside, which sent her flying off me and headfirst over the girls in front of us. She didn’t fall because there wasn’t anywhere to fall to; instead we watched as she was borne away like a surfer on the wave that was surging toward the stage.
Many times on the beach at home, I had felt the full force of the tide. I knew what it was like to be swimming along in the shallows and to suddenly find yourself picked up and hurled onto the pebbles, to feel every bone in your body jolted and to try to claw and scramble your way up the stones, away from the water’s jealous grip. But this was another kind of power altogether. It was like being held in a vise. It suddenly felt like Petra Williams, David Cassidy fan aged thirteen and three-quarters of South Wales, was no more. I was a single droplet in a sea of fans and the only way to survive was to go with the flow, which was currently forcing all of us forward up against a barrier. Sharon was clinging to my arm, her eyes shining with excitement, her mouth fixed in a permanent O of amazement.
I expect you’d be surprised to hear we were talking. The terrible scene on the train was still so close and it had put a wedge between us, but now the crush in the arena had thrown us together once more. Sharon couldn’t have kept a sulky distance if she’d tried. We had never been closer, or farther apart. On the other side of the barrier, which was about twenty feet away, I could see a couple of photographers who were taking pictures of us and the vast crowd of girls. One man with a beard was laughing and pointing at us, like we were animals in a zoo or something.
The frightening thought was that David hadn’t even appeared yet. On the stage was a support band, with some blond girl singing the blues. She was good, the girl was, but the sound system was terrible, all buzzy, and the screams drowned her voice out anyway. I felt sorry for her.
Tonight was all about coming to see Him, to get as near to David as possible. How I had yearned for this moment. For eighteen months, David had colonized my brain until it didn’t feel like my thoughts were my own anymore, yet all I could think was, thank God I’d been to the toilet and changed my pad before we came through the gate. I didn’t want to have an accident. There was no way of getting out now, or in the near future. Olga and Angela, and Ange’s cousin Joanna, had struck out for the dirty bathrooms at the back about an hour ago, and there was still no sign of them.
“IS THAT HIM?” Sharon was shouting and pointing at the stage.
I read her lips.
“NO. HE’LL BE HERE NOW, ANY MINUTE.”
Gillian was holding the other end of Sharon’s DAVID CASSIDY scarf, and the pair of them shifted from foot to foot so the scarf rippled like a flag. I didn’t want to wave my scarf. I thought it might be unladylike, which was something David disliked in a girl. He would prefer us to listen respectfully to his songs instead of bawling our silly heads off. Gillian refused to look at me and I was avoiding her anyway. The journey to London had not been forgiven, nor would it be, by either side, but it was temporarily forgotten because, here among the swarming thousands, we Welsh girls were all each other had. Finding herself surrounded by a foreign foe, Carol was doing what all famous Welsh bruisers did on away matches: she was furiously tackling to the ground any rivals who dared to invade our square foot of space.
When we first arrived, we had found our way to some seats on the terrace, although they were no longer seats by the time we got to them. Everyone was on their feet. I mean everyone.
If you tried to sit down you’d be in trouble. Honest to God, standing up was hard enough. Other girls raced past us, down the steps and into the big grass patch in the middle of the arena, and we belted after them, determined not to let any of the others have a better chance of touching David.
Standing there in the middle of that huge space, I looked around in astonishment. I didn’t know that love had slain so many. Of course, I understood that David had millions of fans, but you could generally put them out of your mind. Not today. Before, it had always been just him and me. Now it was him and us. So many of us, as far as the eye could see.
Outside, in the queue for merchandise, I’d got talking to this tiny blond girl in a thin gray anorak. Moira. She had hitched by herself all the way down from Dundee, and she didn’t even have a place to stay. I was in awe of her courage. Slept on a bench outside the Skyway Hotel, where everyone thought David was staying. Moira said the merchandise was a total rip-off, and it was, but I handed over Dad’s tenner anyway for a two-quid T-shirt with a picture of David wearing that denim jacket I had always loved him in. I desperately needed proof I’d been there, that this wasn’t just another daydream.
“We want David! We want David!” We all joined in the chant that filled White City. We were impatient now. Thirty thousand pairs of impatient platform shoes sounded like stampeding hooves.
“You’re just great, a lovely audience, thank you so much,” the blond blues singer’s voice crackled over the sound system.
“Get off!” we yelled.
Straight ahead, I saw this bald St. John Ambulance man lift one girl above his head like she was a rag doll and post her over the barrier into someone’s arms on the other side. Right then, two security men in black uniforms pushed past me, muscling their way to the stage.
“There’s one of the little bitches over there,” I overheard the bigger guard yell. Really nasty he was. “They’re pretending to faint so they get taken to the front.”
And then He was there. Out of the billowing smoke, he came, like a genie or a god. OhmyGod, David. Oh. My. God. Smiling his David smile and wearing an incredible red suit. David. You’ve never seen anything like it, that long red coat and trousers and a bow tie that sparkled with diamonds. David. And a diamond belt. He looked so unbelievably gorgeous. David. He was laughing and there was some sort of clown dog. Dayyvvvidd. Dayyy-vvvidddd.
Sharon started crying she was so happy. I recognized the song first, from the opening bar. “If I Didn’t Care.” And his beautiful soft voice was caressing us, turning our insides liquid. Melting us like a Rolo. Swaying side to side, the girls from South Wales, we sang along, sang better than anyone else in the whole bloody place.
Then the harmonica came in and was so achingly sad that I began to move toward him. It wouldn’t be easy to get to the stage, but I had no choice, did I? I had to do it. David was lonely, of that I was positive. “I’m coming,” I told him. With me he would not be lonely anymore.
Possessed by that single thought, thirty thousand girls pushed forward toward the love of their life. It was then that I felt Sharon’s hand slip out of mine.
8:36 p.m. Red tails? You could wear red, like a Chelsea pensioner or a Liverpool footballer; you could wear tails, like Fred Astaire; but both together? The only people, until now, who had gotten away with it were circus clowns, pedaling around on tiny bicycles, or else—and Bill couldn’t quite recall how he knew this, but it felt instinctively true—the Devil incarnate.
But that was what the Cassidy guy had decided to wear, on an evening in May. Scarlet tailcoat and matching trousers, with the lapels picked out in rows of rhinestones (or diamonds, as every girl in the place would later insist). His belt glittered with the same gems, and so—God preserve us—did his bow tie. Bill’s gaze kept drifting back to that tie, both dreading and hoping that, in some final farewell to good taste, it would start to spin round, in a giddy flash of gems. What was the whole outfit meant to say? What was the message conveyed by those prim white gloves and the twirling cane: magician, megastar, children’s entertainer, total prick?
Bill stood and watched beside the other journalists, most of them men, none of them Cassidy fans; not in public, at any rate. How surprising it was, then, to see their lips move in sync to half the songs, as if they had been versed in his collected works by the power of hypnotic suggestion. Maybe they couldn’t help it; maybe they just had the radio on all day, in the kitchen at home, beside the draining board, and then on a shelf at the office, next to an open window. Cassidy songs would come and go, through an average radio day, and over the weeks they would seep into your nervous system, whether you wanted them there or not, and you would find yourself breaking out into a song, no more able to prevent it than you would a violent rash.
For a while, it had seemed—to Bill’s relief, and presumably to the fans’ dismay, though they may have been moaning too loudly to let the music through—that David would not be heard that night. He was onstage all right; he had burst onstage through a billow of white smoke, as if trying to impersonate the sun coming out from behind a cloud. And he had started to sing—singing through a grin, which Bill had always thought was impossible. Noddy Holder of Slade used to have a go, but he ended up looking like one of the witches in Macbeth, leering into the mouth of a cauldron. As for a tune, though, who could tell? The PA system at White City was so badly rigged, or the wiring was so amateurish, that all you could hear was buzz: a fearsome, brain-eating hum that burned out of the speakers, with only a faint suggestion of melody veiled somewhere behind. To make matters more infernal, the second song, whatever it was, had incorporated a comedy routine. That is how it must have been described, anyway, on the playlist, although anything less comic would be hard to devise: a dancer dressed as a dog, with whom the star cavorted. “I call him Storm,” he confided to his audience after the idiot had gone. They had roared anyway. Music they couldn’t yet hear, and a piece of funny business with a bloke in a furry suit: to them, it was all revelation. It was all David.
Then, Bill imagined, somebody backstage had rewired a plug or flicked a switch, because, without warning, the voice came alive. “If I didn’t care …” Not a bad voice, either, though it bumped into a croak now and then, and Mrs. Holderness, the choir mistress at Bill’s primary school, would have had something to say about the tuning. (“Up, David, up! We are a kite. We stay aloft with our singing, do we not?”) He was helped by a pair of backing vocalists, pin-sharp pros in slit skirts who never missed a note. They buoyed him up when he went for the highs, and they shimmered as he raced around the stage, and as the yelps of longing came streaming in from the crowd.
“Right little mover, isn’t he?”
Bill glanced to his left, and found a compact, ageless man in a denim shirt, with a beard that looked like a nest. He had shouted to make himself heard, but not quite loud enough.
“Sorry?” Bill shouted back.
“The kid. Look at ’im. Moves well, you’ve got to hand it to him. Watch this bit, he’s going to come to the front in a minute, here we go, and now wait, look what he does with his arse.”
Bill looked, as he was told, and saw the red-clad figure waltz toward them, almost to the brink of the stage. The girls’ cries grew stronger. The figure twirled, one and a half times, then, before setting off upstage, flourished his behind and gave it a slow shake. The two halves of the tailcoat flew apart to frame the gesture. The cries increased threefold, until they sounded like lamentation. Bill felt, more strongly than ever, that he was in the wrong place here: the wrong game, the wrong profession. Certainly the wrong body.
“Tart,” shouted the man beside him. Bill frowned back.
“Who?”
“Him. It’s such an act. Putting it out there for the girlies. ’Slike watching a stripper.”
“A what?”
“A stripper.”
And he was right. If Bill had had Zelda there, or even Roy, he could have pointed at the stage and shown them the reason for their work, the thing
that paid their wages every month. It wasn’t just the songs; sometimes it was hardly the songs at all. It wasn’t the dance. It was the act. Not a put-on, or a fraud. He was an actor, wasn’t he? That was where this whole palaver had started, on TV with The Partridge Family, and now it had spun off and grown, only this time he wasn’t pretending to be someone else. He was pretending to be David Cassidy. And, you had to hand it to the sonofabitch, he was bloody good at it.
The light in the sky above had started to fail. As if in reply, the lights in the stadium came on, flooding the long, deep bowl of mass humanity. Bill looked round, away from the stage. He was close to the barrier now, the one he had come round; somewhere beyond it was the disappointed girl with the autograph book. Everyone lifted their faces to the brightness, which swept across them and reached its destination—the small man onstage, slender as a quill, trapped now in a blinding aura.
Only this time, the kid in the spotlight, no fool, was doing something new. He had the cunning, Bill understood, that every artist needs a drop of, however low his art; the salesmanship passed off as innovation. The kid would give them the song because they knew and adored it, but he wouldn’t simply perform it; he’d play with it, spice it up just enough to gull the girls into believing that they were tasting it for the first time.
“Breakin’ up is hard to do-ooo …” It came out at half the speed, the star strumming softly on the guitar around his neck, lending the lyrics a kick of proper sadness, and the drummer holding back the brisk snap that the girls would have heard on the record, using a brush instead. “Nice,” said the hairy man at Bill’s elbow. “Clever little bugger.”
The girls behind Bill reacted to the unfamiliar speed as if a wire brush were running, ever so gently, along their spines. What had he himself written, in David’s voice, two issues ago? “Y’know when you hear a slow one, and it gives you the shivers? Well, allow me to let you into a little secret. It’s the same when you SING it. True! I can be up there, holding the mike, and I get that kinda feeling myself. If you’ve ever held anyone close, on a dance floor, you’ll know just what I mean!” Which, Bill had privately thought, was as good a way as any of writing about a smooch without actually saying the word. Pete the Pimple called it “slow fuck stuff,” as if he knew what he was talking about. He would have given a filthy grimace if he had been here right now, with Bill, and heard the sobbing and the crying out.
I Think I Love You Page 16