But something was wrong with the sobs.
There is the pain of emotions that you can’t hope to master, whose strength and meaning you hardly grasp, gusting around inside you on a Sunday night, with a song in your heart; and then there is pain, the real thing, as plain as a needle. And Bill, listening through the din, could no longer be certain which was which. His stomach lurched. “What’s your name?” he said to the hairy man. “Jerry. From Rock On.” Why did that matter? “Come with me,” said Bill, turning round and pulling him along. They beat a path through four or five rows of journalists, all of them facing the singer, and all annoyed at being bustled or shoved aside, telling Bill to fucking watch it. And then he and Jerry were in the clear, at the back, looking straight at the barrier.
“Jesus Christ.”
The first thing he noticed, without knowing why, was the woman in white. Not a girl, a woman, definitely, early twenties perhaps, same age as him, though she had tried to dress younger, like someone playing an angel in a school play: white gym shoes with white laces, white jeans, white T-shirt with a screenprint of Cassidy across her chest. The only unwhite thing about her was the face. Even in the shadow of the floodlights he could see that. It was pressed against the bars, but not in eagerness, and it was red. Purple red, like a plum, as if the breath were being squeezed out of her.
All the way along, it was the same. The crush of the people behind, unchecked, with nowhere to go, nowhere to be siphoned off, no direction except straight ahead, toward the source of their joy: the crush was piling up, wave upon wave of pressure, and the people at the barrier were taking the brunt. One girl in green was almost horizontal; she must have crawled sideways to find an easier space and gotten stuck. Some girls had their backs to the bars, as if they had turned round and tried hopelessly to flee. Most girls were crying, but the noise just got sucked into the general cry and lost. Nobody more than twenty yards away would have a clue what was going on. David would know nothing, not yet.
“Help me. I’ve lost my friend.”
Bill looked to his right and saw a slender dark girl, close to the top of the barrier, one leg over it. If she could climb into the press enclosure, she would be safe. One of her shoes had already fallen onto his side. He forced his way toward her, started to scale the bars, ready to reach out and grab her hand, sensing the press of bodies inches away on the other side of the cage. He heard pleading as he climbed, but also, even now, voices yelling, “Out the way,” “I can’t see.” Behind him, David went on singing. “Re-member whe-e-en you held me tight …”
He got to the girl and clumsily took her in his arms. “Help, please,” she sobbed. “It’s my friend. Please, you’ve got to help us.”
Before Bill could pull her to safety, he was plucked off the barrier and landed badly. He felt something give in his back, a muscle tearing just below his ribs.
“What you doing?” It was a security guard, bored and burly. His white shirt was stained with sweat.
“What the hell are you doing?” Bill replied.
“Come on, sir, don’t give us any trouble. You lot’re supposed to be the sensible ones. We’ve got enough trouble with the loonies in there.” He jerked his head at the crowd.
“They’re going to die.”
“Come again?”
“They can’t breathe, the ones at the front. They’re being suffocated. Look at them.”
“Bit hot.”
“What?”
“I’ll get some water. Got a bucket over there.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Bill watched the big man amble away, then turned back to the bars. He saw a very small girl, her face contorted, and her mouth opened wide, soundless with shock, as the crowd behind her gave another heave. One of her arms was bending the wrong way. Another heave. It was like a monster, wallowing and thrashing. Why now? Then Bill realized. David had finished his song. They were cheering, and weeping, and sending him their love. Their undying love.
8:59 p.m. The water hit us girls in the face. Some of the crowd had been begging for water and this was what we got. A bucket chucked at us by a security guard. Then another. I was really angry, you know. I kept thinking of a zoo, only the keepers weren’t taking care of the animals. Hundreds of girls were squashed against the barrier now and no one would open it to let us through. I’d already lost a shoe trying to climb over to ask for help. One of the Judas burgundy-brown platforms Gillian had given me. This lovely-looking man heard me screaming and sort of caught me in his arms, but he’d been pulled off by one of the nasty security people.
In the distance, I could hear David still singing.
Why didn’t someone tell him, for God’s sake? If David knew what was happening to us, he would stop the concert and come and help. Where was Sharon? That was all I cared about now. Sick with panic, I scanned the crush of girls, but Sha’s fair head was nowhere to be seen. It must mean she was somewhere on the floor. I screamed this terrible thought at Carol, who simply nodded. Carol’s life had been so full of disasters, big and small, that this one couldn’t take her by surprise. She knew what the worst was, which made her tougher than someone that young should be, but it also gave her the belief that you could get out the other end.
Holding her hands apart, Carol mimed that, if she made a space, I could go down and take a look. I nodded. I was ready to try anything. Gillian just stood there, her lovely face frozen with shock, as Carol turned and charged into the wall of girls behind them, planting her legs like trees and pushing the girls back with the full force of her shoulders, as though she were in a massive scrum. A small gap opened up between Carol and the wall and I fell to my knees and crawled under the mob, into a dense forest of corduroy flares. It was dark down there, but much quieter as the screams were muffled. Just to my left, I saw something glimmer. Sharon’s white-blond head. It was unmistakable. I stretched out a hand. A shoe came from above and stood on it. I screamed. The shoe released me. I reached out again, as far as I could, managed to get a hand to Sharon’s long hair, and pulled. A hank came away. Now it was Sharon’s turn to scream.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, bach.”
On the next attempt, I managed to grab Sharon’s hand and pull her toward the gap that Carol was still holding open for us.
“My side,” groaned Sharon.
Within a few seconds, I wasn’t sure how, I was surfacing through Carol’s legs and Sharon was following behind, until both of us were back on our feet in the crawl space. We sort of collapsed in each other’s arms, but the hug made Sharon clutch her left side and scrunch up her face. We needed to get her out of here. We all needed to get out. I was suddenly aware of something, or of something missing. David had left the stage. A man I thought I’d seen in Jackie was telling the crowd that if we didn’t move back and control ourselves, the concert would not go on. The music was over, but the sound of crying was louder.
9:24 p.m. About suffering he was mostly wrong, and, to be honest, he had seen very little of the real thing, but this Bill knew, for sure: whenever and wherever people suffer, they will not be helped by the presence of Tony Blackburn. If Tony had crouched at the foot of the Cross, jabbering into the mike, would the lamentation of the women have been any less profound? Might the Titanic have slipped down more easily, with fewer cries of distress, if a perky Radio 1 disc jockey with shoulder-length hair had broadcast a final, uplifting message from the upper deck, flashing that unsinkable grin? And, if not, then what the hell was he doing here, urging the thousands of David Cassidy fans to get a grip? In a crisis like this, with the air being forced out of them, they were unlikely to obey the exhortations of a man they had last heard telling them to go out and buy the latest single from Mud. They didn’t need a DJ, for Christ’s sake. They needed a traffic copper.
Bill stood in the middle of the press enclosure, with bodies curled and sprawled all around. Someone, finally, had had the good sense, or the compassion, to open the single gate in the barrier; either that, or it had sprung wide under the force of th
e throng. Girls shot through it, propelled by the stampede behind, and lay on the grass in shock. There was no music now, just the music of humanity, which was neither still nor sad. One girl was shouting for her mum, who was either on the other side of the bars, having a panic of her own, or several hundred miles away, calmly watching TV.
Bill walked through stuff. Torn programs, orange-tinted lolly sticks, a spangled hair band, a yellow sweater with a rip in it, a tiny patch of blood. One arm of a pair of spectacles. He looked up, and then down again. His shoe had kicked a shoe. He picked it up and surveyed the scene. Two ambulance men were trying to maneuver a girl onto a stretcher. She wasn’t moving, and her eyes were shut. At a guess, there were at least thirty other girls moaning on stretchers.
“Can I help?” Bill said.
“No, son.” The ambulance man didn’t look up.
“Will she be all right?”
“Just got to get her out.”
He moved on and approached a pair of girls, who were resting against the barrier, one sitting with her back to it, another lying across her. He held out the shoe. It was chunky as a brick and scuffed at the toe, with the word Dolcis just visible inside.
“Is this yours? I think you lost one.”
“Oh, thanks, no. Mine was Freeman Hardy Willis.”
“Shall I look for it? Must be somewhere around.”
“No, thanks, honest.” The dark girl smiled. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Bill looked at her friend. It was like a pietà, the angular dark girl holding the smaller chubby fair one in her lap.
“You okay?” He had thought they were just doing it for comfort. Now he saw the other girl’s face. “What is it?”
“My side.” She was blond, a little girl really, with a Welsh accent, stronger than her friend’s.
“Which side?”
“Left.”
“That’s why I’m holding her like this. Less painful. I read in a first-aid book that you shouldn’t put pressure on it when you break a rib. Bad for the breathing. Just lie still.”
“D’you think that’s what it is? Broken?”
“Maybe. She got trod on.”
Bill stood up. “I’ll get one of the St. John’s lot over here. You need it strapped.”
“No, yer okay,” said the hurt girl.
“And we need to get you out of here.”
“Nooo,” she said, much too forcefully, and coughed with the exertion. Her face twisted.
“For God’s sake,” said Bill. “What is wrong with everyone? You’re all hurt, some of you nearly died and none of you want to do anything about it.” He stopped. “Sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just, you know, if I were hurt, and my parents weren’t here …”
The dark girl looked at him. “You’re right,” she said, in a small voice. “And I said we should go and get help, but …”
“But I said we’re staying here,” said the blonde. “He hasn’t even done ‘How Can I Be Sure’ yet, has he? Can’t miss that, can we? Got the rest of my life to be ill.”
Bill smiled. He didn’t get it, even now, not with all the damage done round him, but what could you do? Resign yourself to the lives of others, and their strange ideas of love. He bent down and touched the fair kid on the shoulder. “Take care, okay? Lie still. Let her look after you.”
“I always do, don’t I, Pet?”
The lovely dark girl glanced at him. “Diolch yn fawr,” she said.
Dee olk in what? “See you,” said Bill, and turned away. There were girls coming over the barrier now; they had gotten some sort of ladder up, and somebody was bound to fall and have to be picked up.
“See you,” came a voice behind him. He couldn’t be quite sure whose it was, in all the din. The noise rose. Something was happening, up above. The screaming returned. The lights were beaming once again toward the stage. David was coming back.
9:24 p.m. We sat together for a while, just the two of us, me leaning back against the barrier with Sharon in my lap, trying to take in what had happened. The scene around us was the nearest we would ever get to the end of a battle, only the wounded soldiers were all girls. There were loads of them on stretchers being carried away, some were sobbing and shaking; it was the ones who weren’t crying that you worried for. On the churned-up grass sat hundreds of others, wrapped in blankets, shocked less by the brush with loss of life than by the loss of David.
“You’ve ruined my life, David,” moaned one.
Carol had taken Gillian off to find some hot drinks. I thought that Sharon needed tea with sugar, for the shock, and I wouldn’t have minded one myself. My right hand was throbbing and my heart was taking its time to return to its normal rate. Gillian had been like a peacock throughout the whole thing, a peacock, pretty and useless. Perhaps the personality category of those multiple choices counted for something, after all. I had seen Carol’s, and I would never look at her in quite the same way again. A crisis could tell you something about people; sort out the men from the boys—or girls, in this case. Way to go, Carol, I thought, way to go.
We were still sitting there, Sha and me, when the man came up, the one with the lovely face who had caught me when I climbed over the barrier. He had longish fair hair, darker than Sharon’s. Not sure how old he was; anyone over nineteen and I couldn’t guess their age, they just became old. He wanted to give me a shoe. Funny, he remembered from before that I’d lost mine. Anyway, it wasn’t the Judas burgundy-brown platform that had kicked off all the trouble. I sort of felt it was right that I lost that blimmin’ shoe while I was trying to rescue Sharon.
The man told us we should leave, but Sharon was well enough to say that we had to stick around for David. I sort of smiled and went along with her, because she’d been through enough, you know, but I didn’t feel the same. Not really. All of it, the crying and the broken bodies, it wasn’t David’s fault, but it was because of him. Him and us. Because girls loved him so much they were being carried away in ambulances …
The lovely man told Sharon to take care of herself and he put his hand on her shoulder. I quite wanted him to put his hand on my shoulder, too, but if he had I might have started crying and never stopped.
“Take care, okay? Lie still. Let her look after you.”
“I always do, don’t I, Pet?”
I was so tired and so grateful that I told the man diolch yn fawr instead of thank you. He gave me a funny look. What must he have thought of me, like? Welsh was a foreign language to him. I forgot you shouldn’t speak it to people you didn’t know. He had seemed familiar somehow. Like I knew him from before.
“See you,” I shouted after him. “See you.”
11
We didn’t know a girl died. She must have been a few feet away from us and we didn’t know. Something that big, that terrible, and we didn’t even know. Shocking it was. I thought about it a lot. Went over and over in my mind the part where I’d gone down to find Sharon and the crowd was thrashing and screaming above us like an animal in pain. You could drown down there, I thought, but Sha and me, we came up, through the hole in the crowd that Carol held open for us. Else we’d have been gone.
Outside the stadium, it was so cold. The clothes we’d set out in that morning felt really stupid, summery things. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering; it was like they had a life of their own, like Mamgu’s dentures sitting in the glass of Polident next to her bed, smiling their creepy smile. A smile without a face made you think of death. A girl died. Could have been Sharon. She was the only one of us who was warm because she had her new sweater coat and we got that back on her straight after the doctor strapped her rib.
White City was mad, I’m telling you. Girls were still crying and some were even stopping cars to see if David was hiding in the boot. Gillian stood outside the entrance with a pair of crystal drops rolling in formation down her cheeks, like a Tiny Tears doll. She said her life was over now that David was gone.
“I’ve got nothing to look forward to,” she wailed.
I thought about the Bay City Rollers poster in her wardrobe and of what she’d said about keeping your options open where boys were concerned. She had never loved David like Sharon and I loved him. Girls like Gillian didn’t need David. Girls like Gillian didn’t need somewhere to hide how scared they were to be loved by a real boy; how scared they were that no real boy would ever love them.
When we got to the Underground station it was shut, with a load of police standing outside the gate moving the girls away, and Gillian said she was going to stay the night in London with her new friend, Angela’s cousin Joanna. She would call her mum and dad from the Cramptons’ house. We watched as Gillian and Jo walked off arm in arm, with Angela and Olga trooping a few lonely feet behind.
By the time we managed to find a taxi and got to Paddington, the last train had gone. The next one wasn’t for five hours. We had a bit of money left and Sharon called her mum from a phone box to explain what had happened. I had to dial the number because her arm was bad. With the rest of the coins, Carol got hot chocolate from a machine and we sat on a bench, just the three of us, clutching the white plastic cups to our chests to keep warm. I didn’t call home. The thought of the new green telephone ringing in our hall, and of the conversation I would have to have with my mother when she picked it up, well, I couldn’t do it, could I? The lies I’d told felt like a gravestone on my chest.
I Think I Love You Page 17