I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  He found the row and inched along, past the large ladies, ranged there like five green bottles. OFFICIAL DAVID CASSIDY FAN CLUB OF IRELAND, their T-shirts said. “Scuse me, scuse me.” Petra hadn’t seen him yet, even though he was just feet away; her gaze was still fixed on the stage. The lights had risen for the applause, but now they dimmed once more, as the audience resumed their seats, and Bill was bewildered for an instant by the dark. He tripped over someone’s legs and began to stumble, reaching out to stop and steady himself, heading for a fall. A hand took his, fitted into his and drew him up, as dancers draw each other to their feet. He didn’t fall, just slid neatly into his seat, with far more grace than he’d ever mustered in his life before. Petra smiled at him and didn’t let go, even when he was safely in his place. “Thanks,” he mouthed. Sharon leaned forward, from Petra’s other side, and greeted him with a busy wave, as if she were fifty yards away.

  Up onstage, David was apologizing. He knew they wanted the songs from before, but, just once, he wanted to try something newer, you know, a little more up to date; a little number that explained how he was feeling now, at this wonderful juncture in his life, with all these great folks around him. The great folks shifted a little; you could feel them, brimming with goodwill (couldn’t blame the guy, could you, for wanting to break free of the past; give him a chance, right?), but also aware that any eagerness they could work up for this unknown song would be contrived—marks for effort, not freely given from the heart. And the man onstage took a breath, and sang softly into the mike:

  How can I be sure …

  And, of course, the place erupted. The old ones were the best, that was the point! The past is never dead! Not so long as they were alive. David, their David, was saying so, to them! Sharon was shaking, laughing, although if you had taken a photograph of her at that moment, and looked at it later, the next morning, you would have sworn that it showed a woman crying. She turned to Petra and Bill and shouted, “Oh, he’s a blimmin’ teeease, he is!”

  Petra laughed back and shouted something to Sharon that Bill couldn’t hear. At last, the riot subsided, and the song was under way. Petra looked at Bill and began to sing. No act of memory was needed to summon the words; they poured out of her from the place she had kept them for a quarter of a century.

  Together we’ll see it much better.

  I love you I love you forev-vah.…

  Bill gestured toward the stage. “He doesn’t know the words.”

  “I know the words,” she said. Her hand was still in his.

  They sat on a bench, all three of them, eating ice creams, in the heat of the night. Bill had chocolate and vanilla twist. Petra had strawberry, topped with something orange-brown that she hadn’t ordered and couldn’t identify, even after she’d licked it. Sharon had an Atomic Test Site, a specialty of the Nevada Ice Shack, which she had ordered; you needed two hands to eat it, since it came in twin cones, the mounds of unnatural flavor sprinkled with tiny silver balls. It was served with a lit sparkler, but that was long gone. Now she sat there, gripping it tightly, making an odd crackling sound. “Popping candy,” she explained to Bill. “And when you’re nearly done, you pull the cones apart. Something to do with fishing, the man said.”

  “Fission, I think. Like the bomb. They tested them round here.”

  “What, ice creams?”

  “Atomic bombs.”

  “Same thing, Bill bach, from where I’m sitting.”

  For a minute, they said nothing, happy just to lick and crackle. The streets were crammed. Some people had children with them, even though it was ten to eleven at night, and none of them could go near a casino.

  “It’s like Oxford Street,” said Petra, “during the sales.”

  “Yes, except that when I last looked,” said Bill, “Oxford Street didn’t have a live volcano. I always thought it lacked something.”

  “Where’s that, then?” said Sharon, talking through a mouthful.

  “Well, this is Caesars Palace we’re outside now, as you can tell from the large garden sprinklers in the front. And the volcano is at the Mirage, I think, so I think it must be somewhere … there.” Bill pointed. “Hang around and wait for the wisps of steam, apparently. They tell you she’s about to blow.”

  “Don’t talk about my friend like that,” Sharon said.

  “And don’t mind my friend,” Petra said. “She can’t help it, poor love. Cooped up for decades in a small Welsh town. They go bananas when you let them out.” She licked her pink fingers. “Just asking for trouble, bringing her to a place like this.”

  “Gerraway with you, I’m thinking about staying,” said Sharon. “Saw this ad in the program for David—it said you can train as a dealer, do it in a month, and then you start. Raking it in, you are. Or you can serve cocktails, at the Palace. And I get to wear this Roman goddess outfit, mind, with my boobs in a breastplate.”

  “D’you think they’re, you know, actively looking for short Welsh blondes of thirty-eight?” asked Petra.

  “Thirty-seven, if you don’t mind,” said Sharon. “Until next Friday.”

  “What have you got planned?”

  “Rissole and chips and I get to choose at Blockbuster.”

  “Mal will take you out somewhere nice, won’t he?”

  “Nah, save the pennies,” said Sharon. “David needs a new bike.”

  She seemed to be able to traffic back and forth, Bill thought, between her life and her fantasies without changing gear—without minding too much. If more people in the world were like Sharon …

  “So, when you become a roller-skating Roman gladiator–cum–cocktail waitress,” he said, “what will your husband do? Mal, isn’t it? And your little boys?”

  “Oh, they’ll be fine. Boys, you know. As long as they wash their socks and comb their hair.” That seemed to settle the matter. Bill guessed that Sharon would die a hundred deaths rather than leave her family, but she didn’t need to say so.

  “So, Boss,” she said to him, “what d’you think of it, then?”

  “Which bit?”

  “The concert.”

  “Oh, I quite liked it, actually. Very professional. Good crowd. There was just this one thing that, you know, really got to me.”

  “What?” Petra asked.

  Bill went quiet. “I don’t know how to say this, quite, and at the risk of being serious …” He looked up at them and frowned. “Which one was David Cassidy?”

  “Oh, stop it,” said Sharon, and pushed him off the bench.

  “How’s the jet lag?” Petra said to Bill.

  “Well, I can’t feel anything below my knees, and I think my head may be facing the wrong way, but, apart from that, okay. You?”

  “I don’t know, it’s odd. I don’t know whether to go to bed or have breakfast.”

  “Don’t be daft,” said Sharon. “Gotta keep on going, girl. City that never sleeps and all that.”

  “That’s New York,” said Bill.

  “Well, it’s all America, isn’t it?”

  It was all America. They had, at Sharon’s insistence, wandered over the road to Harrah’s, and watched the bartenders. “More like jugglers, mind,” Sharon said, by way of encouragement. She had read Petra’s guidebook, and tried to summarize her findings in advance. “Shake the cocktails, right, but with these things on fire on their heads.”

  In the end, it wasn’t a bad description. Bill stood and watched the juggling, and found himself thinking of the Dog & Cart, in Turnham Green. There, years before, after Spirit Level hadn’t played too badly, he had tried ordering a martini for a girl called Serena Tombs, the most sophisticated girl he knew, and the angry old barman had looked at Bill for a long time and then spat at him. Now, here he was, in a desert, and the barmen were in flames.

  “Another world,” he said.

  “Sorry?” Petra stood at his side.

  “Just thinking. Sorry.”

  “Can’t hear you.”

  Music and shouting walled them in. A right old racket,
Bill’s parents would have called it. Can’t hear yourself think. That’s how he thought of it, too, nowadays, much to his shame; was that all middle age boiled down to—an irritable quest for peace? In front of him and Petra, Americans half their age danced in a superheated squirm like bacteria under a microscope.

  “Shall we get out of here?” he said to Petra. He had to bend down to make himself heard, and his mouth all but brushed her ear. He felt her hair against his face. She smelled of oranges.

  Petra nodded. “Just let me tell Sha.” She leaned in close and spoke to Sharon, pointing outside, and Sharon nodded back. At least she seemed to be nodding, though it was hard to tell, since she was also jumping up and down, as if on an invisible trampoline.

  They stood on the sidewalk, outside Harrah’s. The air was thick and warm, as if they were standing in a laundry, but it still felt refreshing after the fiery bar. That was like standing over a barbecue.

  “Mustn’t move from here. She’ll panic if we do.”

  “Absolutely. God knows where she’d end up if we weren’t here.”

  “Oh, she’d be fine. Probably have more of a laugh, without us oldies.”

  “Speak for yourself,” said Petra.

  “So long as she doesn’t find that waterslide that goes through a pool of sharks.”

  “She doesn’t have a bathing suit with her,” said Petra.

  “And if she decides she doesn’t mind not having a suit, then our problems will really start.”

  “Americans are a most polite people who are not standing for vulgarity,” said Petra. She never guessed she’d end up quoting her mother, let alone agreeing with her.

  They sat opposite the Mirage. The city seemed to tilt in Petra’s head. Damn this jet lag.

  “Anything you want to do?” she said at last.

  “Lots,” he replied.

  “I meant here.”

  “So did I.”

  Petra took a bottle of water out of her handbag, drank some, wiped it on her shirt and offered it to Bill. He took it and drank.

  “Rather tragically, I do actually want to go to this place called Auto Collections.”

  “To hire a car? In the middle of the night?”

  “No, to look at cars. Very old ones. Best collection in the States, someone said. A weakness of mine, although, as weaknesses go, it’s not too bad, since I could never afford one.”

  “But you’re a big cheese.”

  “No, just sort of medium Cheddar. I don’t own the company, I just run it. And I don’t want to drive a Lamborghini Espada or anything, actually, I just want to look at it. When I was little, I wanted to drive one more than anything else in the world. Took me a long time to realize that what mattered wasn’t the driving—not with all the idiots on the roads—it was the wanting.”

  “Like me and David.”

  “Oh, come now, gentle reader, that’s not fair. You really believed he was yours. I mean, he was your destiny. That’s why you got so pissed off with me at Heathrow yesterday. Because part of him had turned out not to be him.”

  “I’m sorry about that. I was such an idiot.”

  Bill smiled and looked down at her. Something inside him tilted. He decided not to observe the feeling, for once, but to let himself go with it.

  “What did you think of him tonight, honestly?” she asked, after a while.

  “Honestly?”

  “Mm.”

  “Honestly, I spent the time …” He paused. “I spent the time asking myself what you were thinking. Of him.”

  Now it was Petra’s turn to smile. “Well, of course I was dreading it. I couldn’t bear to feel sorry for him. I didn’t want all those women to look at him and feel disappointed. I was sort of cringing for him, you know. And then he came on and started singing, before you turned up, and everything just sort of fell into place. How can I—”

  “Be sure?”

  “Watch it. No, it’s just that he … he both was and wasn’t him. The voice is there, even if he does look older, still pretty fantastic, though. That beautiful smile. But the aura or whatever you call it, that’s gone.”

  “But you made the aura, not him,” said Bill. “That was your job, back in 1974. I did the fake version on the magazine, but you did the real thing. You told a story to yourself, about a boy you all loved, and you did it so brilliantly, with all your heart, that it didn’t matter whether it came true. It just felt true.” Bill drank from the water bottle and passed it back to her. She took a swig. “Sorry, I’m putting it badly,” Bill went on.

  “No, that’s better than I could ever do,” said Petra. “That’s why, when I saw him tonight, I didn’t feel like crumpling, I didn’t feel stupid or disappointed. I really loved hearing the songs again, and David seemed pretty, you know, balanced, considering—”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “—but I just said to myself, well, young Petra, the story’s over, girl. And the funny thing was, I didn’t mind.”

  “What a swell story it is.”

  “Yes.” Petra repeated the line, hearing the faint echo of a tune her dad had sung all those years ago. “Sinatra.”

  “Ah. Now there, excuse me, is a real star. That is who I came to Las Vegas to see.”

  “He’s not here?”

  “God, no. Dead, but immortal. But just imagine, to have been here when he was. You could have come dressed like Ava Gardner.”

  “The bargain-basement Welsh version.”

  “Not at all. The spitting image.”

  “And what would you have come as?”

  “Oh, a very unsuccessful mobster. Machine gun jammed. Losing all my money in minutes.”

  “Not the Boss?”

  “Not the Boss.”

  Petra looked round, at the door of Harrah’s.

  “Talking of losing money, where’s Sha?”

  “Shall I go and see?” Bill asked.

  “No, because then we’ll be split up, and it’ll be a disaster. Give her three more minutes, and then we’ll go back in together.”

  “They do have a separate karaoke bar in there, you know.”

  “Oh God.”

  “She’s probably doing ‘I Am a Clown’ right now.”

  “In clown makeup. If there’s any of my friends who can get hold of a red nose at midnight in a foreign country, it’s her.”

  “Is it midnight? Jesus. What’s the time in England right now?”

  Petra looked at her watch. “Seven in the morning.”

  “That means I have been up for exactly twenty-four hours. Bed, I think.”

  “I think so.”

  There was a pause. Bill, as he often did when confounded, took refuge in mock formality.

  “Anyway, my dear, thank you for a most enjoyable evening.” He gave her a gentlemanly nod.

  “And you, sir. It was most pleasant.”

  Bill looked at her, and said: “Back at the Grand, when you were watching him. David. When you said that thing about it being both him and not him …”

  “Sorry, it sounds rubbish.”

  “No, it makes perfect sense. In its rubbish way.” She laughed. “And what I want to know is,” he went on, “was it the same for you? Did you feel like Petra One and Petra Two, you know, before and after? What did the screaming teenager have to say to this lovely, perfect, grown-up cello therapist with a tiny bit of strawberry ice cream on her cheek?”

  Petra put a hand to her face.

  Bill said, “Come on, who is this I’m looking at right now—you or not you?”

  Petra, for once in her life, had no doubt.

  “Oh, it’s me all right,” she replied. “Just the one of me.”

  Bill leaned toward her. She breathed in and closed her eyes.

  There was an almighty sound. A roar went down the Strip.

  “Oh please,” said Bill, and put his head on her shoulder. Opposite, the volcano had exploded outside the Mirage. Smoke and fire burst from the crater. False lava flowed down the flanks.

  Bill an
d Petra leaned together and laughed, and hoped they would never stop.

  “Bloody hell!” It was Sharon, who had herself erupted from the doors of Harrah’s. She was carrying a bunch of flowers in one hand and a poker chip in the other. “Fireworks.”

  20

  When Petra and Sharon were thirteen, they made a promise. If they were still unmarried when they were old and on the shelf—twenty-nine or thirty, say—they would move in together. So that they would never be alone.

  “Like those two ladies of Llangollen,” Sharon said. She was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, doing her eyes. After all these years, she still had a soft spot for blue mascara.

  “I used to think it was common until I saw Lady Diana wearing it. D’you think Diana read Jackie on how to open out your eyes with blue mascara?”

  “Course she did,” said Petra.

  “Even posh girls?”

  “All girls.” Petra tucked her shirt back into her skirt, having experimented with wearing it hanging loose. In twenty minutes they would meet David, and the girls—the women—were keen to make the right impression.

  “Gorgeous blouse,” Sharon said.

  “My mother’s. Must be twenty years old. Hasn’t dated, has it?” She had decided to wear Greta’s white silk blouse and her pearls. It felt right. In the weeks since she found the letter from The Essential David Cassidy Magazine in the wardrobe, her attitude toward her mother had altered. She was no longer angry with her. Like many mothers of her generation, Greta had a harshness that already felt as though it belonged to a lost, more brutal age. It was as if particles of steel, floating in the air of their Welsh town, had entered her bloodstream. Greta had been trying to prepare her daughter for a better life, a life that offered more than the narrow, ugly existence she hated. Petra saw that now. Wanting to stop your child from making the mistakes you had made. Just as she was doing with Molly.

  “Christ, Pet, don’t look in this mirror.”