I Think I Love You

by Allison Pearson

  “What?”

  “Magnifying and illuminated.” Sharon leaned foward. “I’ve got more open pores than Mars, mun. If I end up in a coma, will you come by with tweezers and take my chin hairs out?”

  “Only if you do mine.”

  “Course I will,” said Sharon happily. “Don’t want Mal seeing my beard. Got to keep some mystery in a relationship, that’s what they say.”

  “Come on,” said Petra, “time to go.”

  “I’ll be down in a minute. Need a pee now, or you don’t know what might happen when you see David, do you?”

  “I’ll go and find Bill and we’ll see you downstairs,” said Petra.

  In the lift on the way down to the lobby, she counted ten Petras in the mirrored walls. “Really not szo bad for a woman at your age,” she told her reflections. Past and present were so close now they were practically breathing the same air. What would the other girls in Gillian’s group think if they knew that Petra and Sharon were about to meet David Cassidy?

  Last night, after the ice cream and the volcano and Bill, a sleepy Sharon had mentioned that Carol was a grandmother. Ryan. Gorgeous little boy. Bit of a handful, mind, like his mamgu. Carol brought him along whenever she and Sharon met for coffee. In the new place where the Kardomah used to be. They had herb teas there now. Carol fell pregnant at sixteen and ended up behind the till at the Co-op. “She’s so proud of you, Pet. Well, we all are. You’re our star, aren’t you?”

  Angela had gone back to England, no one was sure where. Olga did brilliantly in computer sciences and was working in America, Silicon Valley. Married a software engineer called Todd and they had two boys. Autistic, both of them. Tragedy, really, though Olga loved them to bits. Now she was pregnant again and they were praying the third baby would be a girl, you know.

  And Gillian? Last thing Sharon and Carol heard, she had parted from her husband and set up some kind of dating agency in Maidenhead. Not just for any old lonely hearts. You had to be good-looking, with a high net worth. Gillian would see to that.

  Just because she could.

  “His favorite color was brown.”

  “Sorry?” Bill looked up from the display cases in the hotel lobby. He was inspecting the jewelry, and doing the sums. You could fly here, get lucky, win a hundred and fifty thousand dollars at the roulette tables, nip out to the lobby, purchase a platinum and white-gold watch of blinding monstrosity, its face inlaid with so many diamonds that the hands were barely discernible—you couldn’t, in fact, tell the time, which more or less took away the point of the watch—and still get two dollars and fifty cents change, just enough for a twin-pack of Juicy Fruit for the flight home. Neither richer, nor poorer. A nice, well-rounded weekend that would be.

  “I said his favorite color was brown. David’s.” Petra looked at him, as he straightened up. Then she saw the expression on his face. “Oh dear God,” she said, “don’t tell me you made that up as well.”

  “ ’Fraid so. At least, I think so.” To his intense relief, Petra shook her head and laughed. This time yesterday, he thought, she would have kicked me. Or should have.

  “Is there anything about him that is actually true? Anything not made up by you? I’m starting to believe he doesn’t exist. That he never did. You made up the boy I loved. He’s all yours.”

  “No, no.” Now Bill was shaking his head. “No, that’s going too far. For one thing, you saw him yourself last night.”

  “Hologram.”

  “And you heard him.”

  “CD player.”

  “And you cried. Or Sharon did.”

  “Weakness. Welshness.”

  Bill took a moment to think.

  “Okay, what about the bloke I saw at that press conference in 1974? The one who—”

  “You saw him?” Petra was thirteen, again, in an instant; the years peeled back, and there she was.

  “I met him. I went up to his hotel room, too, and we sat and—”

  “You went to his room?” She actually had her mouth open, like a goldfish. “You mean, only one of us got to go to his room, and it was you? Why not me? I knew him better than you.” Petra had to check herself; she was losing her sense of play. Bill felt as much, and gently rescued her.

  “Well, that’s true,” he conceded. “My David poster collection was pitiful. Did you kiss yours, on the wall?”

  “Well, we did at Sharon’s. My mother, hard-core Wagner woman, she didn’t really do pop stars, so no posters in our house. But Sharon had this David shrine and we, you know, genuflected, and the odd snog.”

  “Mm-hmm. You see, as a general rule, boys don’t kiss walls. We knock them down, with a tank if we have one, but we don’t kiss them. It’s like the songs. I played the records only when I wanted to nick a line for the mag.” He paused. “And who knows? Maybe his favorite color was brown.” He shrugged, and added, “Not that I could tell.”

  “What d’you mean?” Petra said.

  “Well …” Bill realized that he had opened up a trap for himself, and was now stepping into it, up to his knees. “I’m color-blind.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you didn’t even know what brown was anyway.”

  “Well, that would be green to me.”

  “You mean the world is full of cows eating brown grass.”

  “The brown, brown grass of home,” Bill said. “I suppose so.”

  “That is the saddest thing I ever heard.” Petra seemed upset on his behalf, more than he would have bargained for. She said, “What color are my eyes?”

  Bill came close and looked into them. She didn’t blink.

  “They’re just right,” he said.

  “You sound like Goldilocks.”

  “And there’s two of them. And they match.”

  “Thank you.” She held her gaze, under his. Only with an effort, it seemed, did she raise it, glance over his shoulder and say, “Here comes trouble.”

  Sharon was coming toward them on tiptoe, as if the lobby were full of sleepers whom she was trying not to wake. “My heels’re giving me a headache,” she said, without preamble. “They’ve got this really loud clack, like.” She was wearing the largest pair of sunglasses Petra had ever seen. Jackie Onassis could have lived behind them, incognito, for months.

  “Sha, what are they like? You look like you’ve got two tellies strapped to your face. And the label’s still hanging down the side.”

  “Great, aren’t they?” Sharon said, drinking in the praise. “Georgie Versace.” She turned to Bill. “Morning, David.”

  “I—”

  “Oh come off it, we know you’re him, really.”

  Petra chimed in. “That’s what I was just saying. And he can’t prove any different. We’re going to go up to David’s suite in a minute, when his PA or agent or whatever comes down to fetch us, and it won’t be David Cassidy at all. It’ll be him.” She looked at Bill. “Better be off. Why not take the service lift and get a head start? Got to get into your white catsuit and everything by the time we arrive.” She frowned at him. “We won’t accept anything less, you know.”

  “ ’Sright,” said Sharon. “Or maybe the red tails, like he wore at White City. That’d suit you.”

  “Possibly,” said Bill. “I mean I packed them, of course, but I thought, in the end, no, they’re a bit quiet for the occasion. Just not enough rhinestone for the kind of impact I was hoping to make. Also,” he said ruefully, “I forgot the bow tie.”

  “Well, of course it’s useless without the sparkly tie,” said Petra. Sharon nodded eagerly at her side, like someone convinced that this was genuinely going to happen. “Nice research, though.”

  “What?”

  “Remembering the bow tie. We’ve got the photos to prove it. You had to cut out the pictures and stick them in your magazine, did you?”

  “Oh no,” said Bill. “I was there.”

  “What?” This was both of them: Petra and Sharon, in chorus.

  “I was at White City
. You know, the awful night when that girl got crushed. I was right there. I saw the sparkly tie and everything. It was madness. Like a war.”

  “But we were there,” Petra said. “We both were. We went with Gillian and Carol. And Olga and Angela.”

  “Were they okay?”

  “Well, Carol was lovely”—this was Sharon now, her accent strengthening and rising as the memory swept back—“but Gillian, she was a right bloody cow, wasn’t she, Pet?”

  “Pretty girl, though,” said Petra, distantly. She looked at Bill again. “Were you really there? Did you stay for the, you know, the bit when it all collapsed?”

  “God, yes, I was right there in the press enclosure beside the barrier. Had to help some girls over. Some of them looked pretty beaten up, I remember that. Funny, most of it’s a blur now. Must be my great age.”

  “Of course.”

  “The one thing I do remember is this shoe. Don’t know why. Just this clunky shoe, sort of reddy-brown. Wandering round with it in my hand, trying to find who’d lost it. Like that really mattered, when there were girls being squashed. Spot the idiot, trying to find a foot to fit a shoe.”

  “Cinderella man,” said Sharon. Her shades were slipping down.

  Petra was very still, staring hard into the past. Playing it frame by frame, then freezing it and trying to zoom in. The sensation of Sharon’s hand slipping from hers. The crowd’s monstrous thrashing, going down among the thousands of legs and spotting her. A bracelet of bright hair about the bone. Grabbing the hair, pulling with all her might. And Carol pushing the crowd back like the champion prop forward she was. Then she said, “I lost a shoe.”

  She and Bill were like divers now, groping through the deep; each waving a hand in the dark, hoping to brush against the other. One boy with a shoe, and one girl without: it could be a scene from a fairy tale. They had been so close, once upon a time, and now they were so close again. Reason told them it was pure coincidence; not that amazing, anyway, if it were true—a pop star had put them in the same stadium, so why shouldn’t he wait twenty years or so and place them in the same hotel? But reason cowered before romance. According to romance, there was no coincidence. That was the word that nonlovers used, sad souls in the everyday world, to account for the workings of destiny.

  We were meant to be here, thought Petra and Bill, both of us, right now. There are two of us. And we match.

  “Told you,” said Sharon, who had left reason behind in Gower, with her husband and children, and was in no hurry to return. “Prince Bill.” She pushed the enormous sunglasses up her nose. “Magic, mun.”

  “Mr. Finn?”

  A Tiggerish young guy was bouncing toward them, hand outstretched. His smile was so bright it belonged in the jewelry case.

  “Hi, I’m Edouard.” He pronounced it the French way, Ed-warrh, though neither Petra nor Bill had ever seen a more complete American.

  “And you must be Petra,” he said to Sharon, who rocked him back with a guffaw straight from the Valleys.

  “Fat bloody chance,” she replied graciously, and for half a second, Bill thought that Edouard’s smile might start to crack. Two of her first three words had set off alarms inside the boy’s head. Nothing bloody, and certainly nothing fat, had crossed his path in many, many years. But, like a pro, he came back strong.

  “So you must be Sha-ron!” he exclaimed, pressing down hard on the second syllable, as if she were a part of the Holy Land, or an Israeli general. Sharon screamed. Her joy was unconfined.

  “Sha-ron-ron-ron-ron,” she sang back.

  The greeter, defeated by he knew not what, turned to Petra. “We are so honored to have you here,” he said, not risking her name, and holding on extremely tight to her hand, as if seeking protection from the madwoman at their side. “David could not be more excited. He is upstairs now, and, if you are ready, we’ll go right up!”

  They moved, as a little group, toward the bank of elevators. Petra asked politely, “Does, um, Mr. Cassidy know why we …?”

  “Oh, totally,” said Edouard, who was always happiest when asked to confirm something that he knew, or believed, to be true. “He just loves your backstory. Great backstory. Both of you,” he went on, with a nervous grin at Sharon. “He loves you.”

  Sharon started singing again. Bill and Petra stood next to each other, waiting, and stared silently down at their shoes.

  Sharon was kneeling on the floor of the bedroom. David was smiling up at her.

  “No, it’s better like that,” she said. “Fits better. What d’you reckon, Pet?”

  Petra considered. “No, that one goes better in the middle. Then he’s with both of us, together.”

  They had a sheaf of pictures, and Sharon wanted to make an album right now, before they even got on the plane. There had been a proper photographer when they went with Bill to meet David. A burly, beaming man from a local company called Cyclone Images, with a picture of a tornado on the back of his shirt.

  “How d’you do?” said Sharon, shaking his hand.

  “Hi, I’m Cy,” he said.

  “Oh my God, like the clone!” she shrieked. Cy looked confused. He set to work, arranging the tripod and lights, so that when David came in they would be, as he put it, ready to roll.

  And when they were done, and the roll was over, and David was chatting with Petra and Bill in the corner, Sharon asked Cy—cheeky, mind, him being a pro and everything—if he would take some extra ones with her new camera. For her collection. And, for once, it went according to plan: Cy did as he was asked, and David posed a few times more, with each of them in turn. Sharon kissed the photographer as he left, saying, “Thank you, Cy,” as loudly as possible, to see if she could make Petra giggle. And when they had said good-bye to David, who was due at a sound check for the evening show, Sharon had gone—no, she had run—out of the hotel to the camera shop across the street. They could do them in an hour, but you had to pay more. She paid more, refusing Petra’s offer to chip in. It was as though, if Sharon didn’t get the photos printed now, the memory of the morning would fade in her head, and with it the proof that it had actually happened; she would have nothing to show that she had ever been here, with him, hand in hand. He had given her a hug. Three decades, waiting for a hug.

  “God, he’s lovely, isn’t he? Brilliant. The whole thing.” Sharon sat back and admired her handiwork.

  “Yes,” said Petra. She had been thrown, for a second, by vertigo. Not space vertigo, although their hotel room was number 2147, twenty stories up, with a view down over the Strip; more like time vertigo. A sudden plunge, which she wasn’t expecting, and could hardly cope with—back through the years, almost violently, to something … that matched where they were now. Where had that been, and when? Something about the carpet under her fingers now, rich and scratchy, as she knelt beside Sharon; and in the air—not this air, Vegas-parched, air-conditioned air, but wafted in, on the air of the past—the weirdest smell. Like you get from burned hair, with a cheap hair dryer; a smell so sharp that it hit you between the eyes, and behind the nose, and stayed for a while, and everything in you reeled. And then it was gone.

  “Sorry?” she said to Sharon, who had spoken while Petra was in a dream.

  “Hello, twp face, I said I could die happy.”

  Petra smiled. “Live happy. Better for you, bach.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. And cheaper. Better chips. You don’t get decent chips when you’re dead. What do they call them here? Fries.”

  They bent over the photos again.

  “I like this one of you and me,” said Sharon. “See how young we look.”

  “Camera never lies.”

  “And I like this one of me and David and Bill, although Bill’s got this kind of goofy look. This is better of him, just with David. Oh, and this one’s even better. You and Bill. This is the best.”

  Petra was silent.

  “D’you know what David said to me, when you and Bill were posing for Mr. Clone?”

  “Don’t tel
l me.”

  “He said—looking at you two, right?—he says to me …”

  “What?”

  “He says, ‘I think she loves him.’ ”

  Petra laughed. “David Cassidy did not say that.”

  Sharon hesitated, then wrinkled her nose and laughed back.

  “No, but he could have, couldn’t he? Just because I made it up doesn’t mean it’s not true, does it?”

  “Well …”

  “And it is true, so there. You do love him.”

  “Who? Who do I love?”

  “And David Cassidy brought you two together. That’s his, what you call it. His destiny.”

  “Whose? Now I’m really confused. Sorry, there’s too much loving going on round here.”

  At once, Sharon started to sing. “There’s a whole lotta lovin’ goin’ on, in my heart …” She reached out and gave Petra a hug. “More for me,” she said.

  Petra pulled back. “What d’you mean?”

  “Well, now you’ve got Bill—”

  “Excuse me, I have not got anyone—”

  “Now that you have, Pet, well then. David’s mine now, isn’t he? Fair play. He’s all mine.”

  Petra moved to embrace her friend, and as the smaller woman’s fine blond hair floated sideways onto her blouse it delivered a familiar shock.

  “All yours.”

  21

  Petra sat at her kitchen table, quite still, holding a mug of coffee in both hands. She watched the steam rise from it, in the morning light. The day was still young; their flight had landed not long after dawn.

  She took a sip, then frowned at something. Her suitcase, in the doorway, airline tags attached. Just waiting for Molly to go tripping over it when she came in.

  Petra rose and carried the case upstairs, bumping its bulk on every step, then swung and heaved it onto the bed. She breathed out, and was about to leave the room, to go downstairs and finish her coffee. She paused. Better hang her new linen jacket up before it got too creased. She went back to the bed, and clicked the two clasps on the case.

  It opened, she swung back the top, and stopped. Her first thought was that she had taken the wrong suitcase at the airport. But no, there was the jacket, neatly folded, and the edge of her mother’s blouse underneath. But on top was something that was not hers. Yet it was meant for her, because her name was on the front.