I Think I Love You

10

7:50 p.m. He felt like Gulliver. Around him swarmed the little people. Most came up to his chest. Others came up to his waist. Some he couldn’t see at all, could make them out only by the pressure of their jostling as they flowed past, by their cries and smothered squeals. What had the Lilliputians done to Gulliver? Tied the big man down by his hair, that was it, pegged it to the ground and thrown tiny ropes over his giant limbs. The likelihood of that happening today, Bill thought, was growing by the minute. He had come here for work, and a laugh; now, he saw, it was more a question of getting out alive.

And, needless to say, he was the only male. This Lilliput was a female community, in which men, with one exception, were neither welcome nor required. Far away, Bill had seen, or believed he had seen, the bald, bespectacled head of a St. John Ambulance man, who seemed to have lost his cap, his cool and his bearings all at once; but even he had vanished into the throng, perhaps for good. Poor bloke. Most days he gathered up riders with cracked collarbones at point-to-points, or poured fresh water down the throats of cross-country runners; nothing in his experience, or his gentle faith, could have prepared him for thirty-five thousand teenaged girls, raging like bees in the hive of White City on a Sunday night. Christ, the din.

Bill had made a mistake, and he was paying for it already. “Get down there among the little girlies,” Roy had said, rubbing his hands unpleasantly. “You know, get there early, pack a meal, take a tent, lots of fresh water, pith helmet. Dig yourself in and ask them what they’re doing there.”

“They’re coming to see their favorite pop star,” Bill had replied, nonplussed.

“I know that, wanker. But go and ask them to their little faces, see what nonsense they come out with. Take one of them machines to measure sound, what’s it called? Dumb-bell level?”

“Decibels.”

“That’s the one. See if you can get a reading on their screams. We could run a little bar chart, give a prize to the loudest, that sort of malarkey. Howlin’ Hannah from Harpenden. Sharon the Shouty.”

“But I thought there was a press enclosure.”

“There is, if you’re a poof.” Roy had given him the same look he gave anyone who wore a seat belt in a car.

“But it’s nearer the stage,” Bill had gone on, prolonging an argument that could not be won.

“So what? So you can see up his purple shorts? Look, matey, we don’t often get a chance to see our readers in the flesh, so for God’s sake go and press it. Have a squeeze and report back to me. Arright?”

Bill had obeyed, in part. He had gotten hold of a press ticket, after no more than nine phone calls to the promoter’s office. It would mean being penned in, he suspected, like a monkey, behind some sort of cage, although his even stronger suspicion was that the human activity outside would be the most animal of all. The girls would go ape, and he would end up grateful for the iron bars. On the other hand, he would, for a while, do the bidding of his boss; get there well ahead of the show, mix with them as the mood grew, get some quotes, then make his way to the safe haven of his fellow journalists before the main event. The trick was to time it right.

An elbow caught him under the ribs and knocked the wind out of him. He keeled forward, catching his jaw on the head of the girl in front.

“Hey,” she said, twisting half round, “watch it, okay?” She had short hair and glasses, and for a second Bill thought, with an odd pang of fellow feeling, that she was a boy. But what would a boy be doing here wearing a David Cassidy scarf?

“Sorry,” Bill said, or tried to say. He was still fighting to get his breath back, and the word came out as zerr.

The girl had a friend with her, who giggled. She was round and pink-faced, in a yellow sweater.

“What you doing here, anyway?”

“Erm, writing. I’m a writer.”

“What, like poems?”

“No, I write for magazines,” Bill said, dropping easily and untruthfully into the plural. The sound of chatter and hum, on every side, was deafening, but the three of them were squashed so tight that they could practically talk straight into one another’s ears. Bill bent his head to their level.

“D’you do pop?” the round girl asked.

He coughed, still wheezing slightly. “Um-hum, I cover quite a lot of the music scene, actually. Rock, jazz. A little bit of pop.”

“D’you do interviews?”

“Sometimes. If the editor thinks I should.”

“Is that what you’re doing here, then?”

“I suppose so.”

“So why are we the ones asking all the questions?”

Bill had no answer to that. He saved face, as he often did, by raising the level of his lies.

“Well, sometimes doing an interview, it isn’t just a matter of Q and A, you know. It’s like, like, a conversation. Like you’d have with a friend …” The girls were screwing up their faces. Only fifteen or so, but they could smell nonsense when it came their way; they could certainly rumble a boy—or, in this case, a grown-up—who was trying too hard.

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 f*ck 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.

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 f*cking 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 the 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.”