Bill hadn’t thought of the Pearl Woman for a long while. He was sure she hadn’t thought of him once, after that evening, other than to raise him as a comical species, a full-grown punch line, among other women, for a week’s worth of lunches and drinks. “ ‘First we go to D …’ No we don’t, matey. You’re not even getting to A tonight, believe me …”
No chance of finding her now, ever, to say sorry, and to confess that now he, too, had gotten the joke. Better late than never. How could you retrace your steps like that, back into the past? Not hook up briefly, or rekindle, but truly find the old path, into the woods? He replaced the tapes, turned off the light and closed the door, then ambled back to his laptop. Its screen glowed at him, in the dimly lit room, like a window in a city by night.
I replied to an ad in the Evening Standard. I didn’t expect to get the job; I’m not sure I even wanted it. I remember leaving the interview, where the exact nature of the work—and the name of the pretty boy at the heart of it—had, for the first time, become clear. I could have stood up and declared to the interviewer, “Madam, I spit on your offer of toil, be it ne’er so well remunerated. I bid you good day.” Instead of which, I said yeah, okay. The music meant nothing, I reasoned, but the money sounded good.
That evening, I went to see my girlfriend. I shall call her Rachel. Knowing that I had been for an interview, she asked how it had gone. Well, I said. Offered the job on the spot. From now on, she could introduce me as a music journalist. Result: the very words made her melt. Her own job was steadier, and better paid, but this—and remember, we are talking 1974—had the edge in glamour.
“Who will you get to write about?”
“Oh, you know: Plant, Page, Clapton. Maybe James Brown, if he’s over.”
Consider the scene: not only was I lying about the strength of my wish to meet proper, hairy rock stars; I was lying in the full knowledge that I never would meet them, because I would be too busy writing about a smooth-chinned pop goblin whom I fervently hoped I wouldn’t have to meet at all. My secret boy, of whom she must never know.
A couple of weeks later, I was sitting at my desk, staring at a heap of correspondence. “Zoe,” I said to my boss, “these are from girls to David.”
“What do they want?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing much. Promises of undying love for them and them alone. Offers of marriage. His hanky. His horses in Hawaii. His favorite color. Things like that.”
“Yes,” said Zoe, “the usual.” I asked her what to do with them. “Do?” she replied. “Answer them, of course. Not personally. Just draft some general replies and give them to me. I’m having the page made up in a mo. We just call it ‘A Letter from David.’ ”
I looked at her, like a child being prodded onto the stage in a nativity play for the first time. Then I said, in a small voice: “But I’m not him.”
And Zoe smiled back. “You are now, darling,” she said. And so I was. And you know what? It was easy. I took the first letter. It was the one about David’s favorite color. Obviously, I would have to dig around to find the answer; there had to be one, after all. Everybody had a favorite color. I went and asked a colleague. “What’s Cassidy’s favorite color? Where can I look it up?” He sneered at me and said something like: “Don’t look it up, wanker. MAKE it up.”
Still, I was uneasy. This was journalism, after all, not fiction. Wasn’t it? As a compromise, I gave David my own favorite color, forgetting that it might not be the most convincing choice, because I was color-blind. I turned back to my typewriter and wrote: “Hi there, girls! People often ask me for my favorite color. So I have to tell you my favorite color is brown.”
Bill sat back and thought about Ruth. What would happen if she picked up a copy of the magazine, in three months’ time, and saw his article, and recognized herself? Bill didn’t know whether he was revolving this idea in his head because he feared the consequences, or because he wished for them—wanted her to think of him in return, search for him, find a number, call him up … “Bill, hi. It’s, um, Ruth. Ruth from before. You know, David Cassidy days. I read your piece, and I couldn’t help …”
There was more. I didn’t just deliver the holy writ of David Cassidy. I put together the Bible. I learned to design a page and lay out text. I learned how to cut and paste, though not with a scroll and the click of a mouse; in those days, cutting meant scissors and paste meant a pot of something so white, rank and gloopy that we convinced ourselves it must have come from a sperm whale. To me it stank of boiled bones, but that was not disgusting enough for my fellow pasters. “Probably the sperm,” one of them put it; “sperm whale sperm.” And from that moment on our pot of adhesive was labeled Moby-Dick. “Pass the Moby,” we would say to one another, breathing through our mouths.
When millions of human beings remember David Cassidy, they think of a voice, and then of—I don’t know, the burning smell of their old hair dryers, perhaps, from the time when they got themselves dolled up for this unavailable pop star while reading our magazine. And me? Well, I must be the only person who, whenever the word Cassidy crops up in conversation, thinks “Moby-Dick.” And vice versa.
Bill felt a key turn inside his head. Something like that; something released. He hadn’t found that glue smell at the back of his senses, under all the other rubbish, for nearly twenty-five years, yet here it was, set free by a few idle words. Bill didn’t write these days, not unless you counted Post-it notes, stuck on the side of the computer or the front of a fridge. And e-mails, of course: the rosaries of the twentieth century—an endless clicking of fingers, unique to each soul, sending off complaints, regrets and pleas into the unknown, hoping they find their mark. But that wasn’t writing. He hadn’t written anything longer in years, not even a letter of condolence; a letter of any kind, in ink, would be as unthinkable, as physically unmanageable, as writing the kind of poems he tried to write at college, to girls whose names never seemed to rhyme with anything. What word chimes with Bethany or Jenny? Or Pippa, except a stripper? Or Amanda, outside a limerick? Or Ruth, forsooth?
Ruth. Bill had no idea where she was living these days. He tried not to put an even more fearful suggestion to himself, the kind that came at night: What if she was not living at all? Contact had been lost soon after they split, and, without many mutual friends, it would have been hard to restore.
One true love. Is that the ration allotted to everybody? There was that old myth, wasn’t there, some creaky Greek legend about each person being a half, like half of a broken pot, and life being a question of watching and waiting, wandering the earth, hoping for your other half to show up and slip into place. A perfect fit, to make a whole. If that was so, Bill was still waiting; whether he was still watching was another matter. He had ceased to look. Ruth had come as close as anyone, but they both knew that the edges had not really locked together; there were shards missing, it was not quite right.
Bill had read enough of his own women’s magazines to know that it’s never quite right, there is no perfect fit, and your best bet is to spend a lifetime with someone, smoothing the edges, making repairs, getting used to the cracks. Then, with luck, as the end nears, you might suddenly realize that the pot has been finished, and that two have become one.
And what about those girls, the ones who read his David Cassidy thoughts each week? They had been sure of their one true love; the fact that millions of them had the same true love didn’t seem to bother them. Clearly, David was the perfect fit for all sizes. That woman who had come into the office the other day: the batty old Welsh girl, one of the receptionists had called her—except that, when she arrived, she didn’t seem batty at all. Or old. One of the least mad people that Bill had ever met, though the Welsh part was true. Petra. And the way she talked about her past, her Cassidy days, as if she knew how mad she must have seemed at the time, and yet was not prepared to disown it now—refusing to take the easy adult option, and dismiss her yesteryears. Better to cling to one’s youthful foolishness, surely, and argue for i
ts importance, for its lasting place in the heart, rather than pretend it had never happened … Love had been true, for Petra, utterly true, even if the truth was made up. Bill wondered what would happen when and if she found out that he, a lout of a literature student, had done most of the inventing. He hoped she wouldn’t scratch his eyes out. She didn’t look the type. She didn’t look any type at all. She seemed like herself.
So, where did it all go wrong? David and me? Did he go cool on me, or find someone else; or did I force the issue, saying I needed the space?
I really did need the space; when I found myself crammed into White City, in May 1974, at David’s final London concert, with teenage girls all around me, fainting not with excitement but because the crush was breaking their bones and, in one case, squeezing the life from their bodies, I wanted out. I remember walking away that night, away from the stadium, gulping down lungfuls of air.
Not long after that, David Cassidy quit. Not long after that, The Essential David Cassidy Magazine also called it a day; the right choice, I guess, on the grounds that it’s hard to maintain a church when the god has announced his retirement.
Where, I wondered, did the congregation go? Into their grown-up lives: taking exams and jobs and husbands; first filing away their David posters and clippings, with their copies of my magazine, and then, somewhere along the way, just losing them, in attics and house moves. How appalled they would have been, as thirteen-year-olds, to think that there could ever, ever come a day when they wouldn’t know, or even mind, where their most treasured possessions were—that three-speed record player, that unscratched copy of Cherish …
I never did have that album. I never bought a David Cassidy record; to be brutal, I can’t swear that I ever sat down and listened to a David Cassidy song—not all the way through, from intro to fade-out. Oh, I knew the songs all right, but that’s because I had photocopies of the inner sleeves Sellotaped to the wall above my desk. Whenever inspiration flagged, I would raise my eyes to the lyrics in front of me, steal a phrase, and hammer it into my latest piece of Davidry. “Cherish is the word I use to describe / all the feeling that I have hiding here for you inside.”
How hard is it to work that into a letter? Christ, it sounds like a letter to begin with. The guy was doing my work for me.
Bill stopped and went to a cupboard next to the bathroom, pulling it open to reveal a heap of suitcases. He yanked them out, one by one, taken aback by his own haste. At the back, under a rolled sleeping bag, there was a cardboard box. He lugged it back to the living room and delved. It was full of clippings, as yellow as old skin. He flicked through them fast, dropping some onto the carpet. At last he paused, a small magazine in his hand. He took it back to the desk, smoothed it out, and began to type again.
It’s so fantastic to feel the cool water closing over my hot, citified body! And then I just lie there on the side of the pool, drying off and looking down across the valley. It sure is a magnificent sight …
Not me drying off! The valley, I mean!
Only now, at this distance, could Bill grasp the full strangeness of his first job. Petra had gotten him thinking about it. Who would he rather have been, himself or David? By the age of twenty-four, Bill’s career was taking off. Cassidy’s, having flown a thousand times higher, was over, or in free fall. Not for him the normal arc of a life: a stumbling start, moving toward some distant peak that you finally reached in your middle years, even though the goal, once attained, might not seem worth the climb.
What must it be like to enjoy your finest hour before you turn thirty? Keats. All those books of poetry, scrawled upon by night, and shelved in shame when Bill put away childish things to enter the world of work, turned out to have been right all along. They held the clue, to love and fame alike. And the pop star, burning bright and fading fast, turned out to be little more than a rewrite of the Romantic poet. If Cassidy had died at White City—if he, not his fan, had been smothered in the crush—might it have been for the best? Wouldn’t he have been made immortal, trapped at his moment of perfection?
The fate of the teen idol is the fate of beautiful girls down the ages. The idol has to be seen as virginal but highly desirable. Desirable, yet untouched.
Mind you, Cassidy was still alive, older and wiser with some sharp things to say about his condition, and good luck to him. He had gotten married, Bill knew that much. Two times, maybe three. The first must have been when he was still in his decompression chamber, recovering from global celebrity. Kay someone. A small blonde with cheeks like a peach. “Peachy-creamy,” as Bill’s Aunt Rita used to say, when asked how she was. Rita, in summer frocks for two-thirds of the year, married to Uncle Douglas, who used to stoop down, as if his waist were hinged, and gravely present Bill with a birthday fiver. One year, the banknote rustled a little as he placed it in the boy’s grateful hand. A year later, the rustle was a shake, the paper trembling and rattling against Bill’s palm, and then Douglas was not there anymore; his tall frame confined to a chair, and finally a bed, the spasms—so Bill heard from a whispering cousin—grown uncontrolled. Rita, by then, was a ghost of a woman, soot dark around the eyes, exhausted by the love she had given to her man, once lofty, now quaking and unhinged. Yet still, at Christmas, unaccompanied, she wore butter yellow or Mediterranean blue, and smiled as she handed round the plates. “Peachy-creamy, thank you, Bill,” she would say.
Who had Bill loved? Who did he want to take care of, once Ruth had disappeared? He had made love, God knows, sometimes not for weeks, or even months, and then in a fever of entanglements and three-timings; dressing quietly at dawn, in an Edinburgh hotel, while one woman slept, in order to catch a train to London and a lunchtime tryst with another, who stood in her hallway as he came in, wearing court shoes and nothing more, and received him there, pulling him into her, against the rain-damp coats. Then dinner with an old friend, unhappy now, requiring consolation. Bill had gone to bed that night, alone, feeling like an exhausted oil well, and slept for thirteen hours.
Or that Italian beauty, too beautiful for him, no name; maybe she hadn’t seen him well, maybe that distracted mist in her violet eyes had been a myopic blur; finding themselves in front of the same painting, in, where was it? Milan, perhaps, when he had ninety minutes of museum-graze between meetings? Talking sotto voce about the picture, as you do, as if in church, she in her halting English, Bill in his backward Italian; then a pause, a look passed back and forth, then downstairs, don’t rush, quiet marble corridors, heels clacking, finally an unlocked room, found and opened and locked from inside, Bill knocking over a mop or a broom, the beauty trying not to laugh out loud, then turning her face to the wall and raising, almost primly, the hem of her dress. What was it, seven, eight years ago? Didn’t feel real, now, from this distance.
That was the thing with making love; over time, it took on the finished feeling of a story, or the gleam of a film, like something that had happened to someone else. (With love itself, the true love of legend, the opposite was true; as it grew, you could no longer imagine yourself without it. The love made you.) Sex opened up a rift from the world, rendered it redundant for a minute, or a month. Three days on the trot, once, in London, 1981, missing the royal wedding completely; getting out of bed to pee in the basin, hungry as lions, with no time to eat; who had been that devourer? Mary, that was it, saintly Mary, with the haircut of a principal boy, like Peter Pan, who had been with him for six weeks in all, and had never met any of his friends.
Then there was Melody. Lord help us, Melody. Bill still smiled, when he thought of his mate Pete the Pimple, informed over a pint that Bill had met a girl named Melody.
“You have got to be kidding,” Pete said. “Bill, that’s not a girl. That’s a record label. That’s a shampoo. That’s half a fucking magazine.”
In those days, everyone, but everyone, read Melody Maker and New Musical Express, and so, of course, from that day in the pub to the end of the relationship, Pete and all his mates had called Melody NME. To her face.
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“How’s it going, NME?” they would chorus as she drifted in, long skirt frilling the floor, and drank her barley wine. One time she came to a football match carrying a flute. Melody believed that in a previous life she had been an Egyptian cat, and her lovemaking was certainly feline, all sensual, selfish ease mixed with mad voracity. “Sleeping with the NME,” as Pete observed. Bill, despairing of her finding a job, had forced her to fill in a careers questionnaire, only to come back three hours later and discover that, under the heading, “Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she had written the single word Waterfall.
Melody had wafted off, like a cirrus cloud, one afternoon, and such had been the relief that it wasn’t until two weeks later that Bill, checking his bank balance, realized she had taken the lot.
By then, Bill was busy working for Puzzle Time, which sold more solidly, and made more money, for Nightingale Publishing than all but three of its other titles. He managed six months before moving sideways to another journal, and then, a year later, to another, but always within the same parent company. He was becoming a corporate child. And still, on dank Friday evenings, without even time for a bath, he would lug his guitar case from behind the sofa, or from under the vacuum cleaner, and hurry to Kentish Town or unfindable church halls off Tooting Broadway, to play in bands that seemed to change name, identity and purpose even more frequently than he changed jobs.
The most enduring, from 1975 to 1978, and still the most inexcusable, had been Green’s Leaf, Bill’s one and only foray into prog rock. He had been bandless and uneasy for a year, with Ruth gone and his other love, Spirit Level, cast to the winds. Spirit Level had lasted so long, and weathered so much, and put such heroic effort into never improving, despite an unceasing change of cast, that Bill presumed it could never die; for him, it was like playing in goal for a hopeless but venerable football club that would never rise beyond the Fourth Division. Then came the news: not one but two of its members, secretly and independently, had decided to sit accountancy exams, and had in fact met, face-to-face, at the door of the municipal sports hall where the exams were being taken. Both wore suits. The horror of this coincidence had, not unnaturally, finished the band.
I Think I Love You Page 29