I Think I Love You

11

We didn’t know a girl died. She must have been a few feet away from us and we didn’t know. Something that big, that terrible, and we didn’t even know. Shocking it was. I thought about it a lot. Went over and over in my mind the part where I’d gone down to find Sharon and the crowd was thrashing and screaming above us like an animal in pain. You could drown down there, I thought, but Sha and me, we came up, through the hole in the crowd that Carol held open for us. Else we’d have been gone.

Outside the stadium, it was so cold. The clothes we’d set out in that morning felt really stupid, summery things. I couldn’t stop my teeth from chattering; it was like they had a life of their own, like Mamgu’s dentures sitting in the glass of Polident next to her bed, smiling their creepy smile. A smile without a face made you think of death. A girl died. Could have been Sharon. She was the only one of us who was warm because she had her new sweater coat and we got that back on her straight after the doctor strapped her rib.

White City was mad, I’m telling you. Girls were still crying and some were even stopping cars to see if David was hiding in the boot. Gillian stood outside the entrance with a pair of crystal drops rolling in formation down her cheeks, like a Tiny Tears doll. She said her life was over now that David was gone.

“I’ve got nothing to look forward to,” she wailed.

I thought about the Bay City Rollers poster in her wardrobe and of what she’d said about keeping your options open where boys were concerned. She had never loved David like Sharon and I loved him. Girls like Gillian didn’t need David. Girls like Gillian didn’t need somewhere to hide how scared they were to be loved by a real boy; how scared they were that no real boy would ever love them.

When we got to the Underground station it was shut, with a load of police standing outside the gate moving the girls away, and Gillian said she was going to stay the night in London with her new friend, Angela’s cousin Joanna. She would call her mum and dad from the Cramptons’ house. We watched as Gillian and Jo walked off arm in arm, with Angela and Olga trooping a few lonely feet behind.

By the time we managed to find a taxi and got to Paddington, the last train had gone. The next one wasn’t for five hours. We had a bit of money left and Sharon called her mum from a phone box to explain what had happened. I had to dial the number because her arm was bad. With the rest of the coins, Carol got hot chocolate from a machine and we sat on a bench, just the three of us, clutching the white plastic cups to our chests to keep warm. I didn’t call home. The thought of the new green telephone ringing in our hall, and of the conversation I would have to have with my mother when she picked it up, well, I couldn’t do it, could I? The lies I’d told felt like a gravestone on my chest.

Once we were on the train, all I could think about was Princess Margaret. My hand, the one that got trodden on, was throbbing and there was a bruise spreading through it like ink was being injected under the skin. It hurt to clench my fist. I didn’t know how I’d be able to play the Bach suites. In the seat opposite, Carol snored her honking piggy snore; she made a funny whistling at the end of each breath, like a kettle. I felt exhausted, but also really alert with a dry headache. Next to me, Sharon was dozing with her head resting on my shoulder. Her fine, baby-blond hair settled on my bomber jacket, and the static gave me a fuzzy electric shock when she woke with a jump at Swindon.

The sky over the station was the color of Fanta. It didn’t seem real, nothing seemed real.

“Is there a fire, Pet?” she asked.

“Don’t be daft, it’s just the dawn, isn’t it? Back to sleep, now.”

“I knew you wouldn’t enter the quiz with her,” she murmured. “Gillian doesn’t even like David that much.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, we won’t win,” she said, yawning.

“Why not?”

For a while I thought she’d gone off again, then she said: “Girls like us don’t win things. They’ll give it to some girl up London way.”

“Annette Smith of Sevenoaks.”

“Swotty cow.” Sharon laughed, then she winced because it hurt to laugh. “Thing is,” she said, “Annette Smith’s tiebreaker won’t be a patch on yours.”

I was telling the truth when I told the girls that I hadn’t entered Gillian for the quiz. My hand did hesitate over the section where it asked you to name the friend you would like to come with you to meet David Cassidy. Why didn’t I put Gillian’s name down? I was definitely scared enough to do it. I knew what the price for displeasing her would be, and I knew that I would be paying that price for as long as we were both in the same school. In the end, it was something so small really, something small and big. In the border of the form, all around the edge, Sharon had done this gorgeous, intricate decoration, made up of David’s name and his date of birth repeated again and again, like something from a medieval manuscript, so our entry would jump out at the judges. In one corner, in the most romantic lettering I’d ever seen, she had put something that caused a stab to my heart.

Petra Cassidy

I was the only one who knew what it cost her to write it.

• • •

We made the front page of the South Wales Echo: GOWER TEENY BOPPERS IN CASSIDY TRAGEDY. There was quite a welcome party when we finally pulled into the station. Sharon’s mum ran up and sort of hugged us and shook us at the same time. Mrs. Lewis was crying and laughing. A good-looking black man in jeans was standing with her. He put a blanket round Carol, who fell into his arms and sobbed like a girl I’d never met. None of us had set eyes on Carol’s dad before. He was the missing piece of her, and the minute I saw him the puzzle of Carol solved itself in my mind.

Over Mrs. Lewis’s shoulder, I saw my mother shimmering at the end of the platform. She was wearing her tweed suit, the one she wore for parents’ evenings and the crematorium. Dad was standing behind her, but I couldn’t see him properly.

I know what I did was bad, really bad, you know, but I still don’t think she should have hit me. Not on my face, not with all those people looking and everything.

For the next three days, she kept me in my room, left food outside on a tray with a paper napkin; even Dad wasn’t allowed to speak to me. Downstairs, their quarrel raged like a distant battle. Sometimes I could hear loud bangs, cries, then silence till it started up again. Sharon’s mum had rung to tell my parents we’d all been delayed in London after the riot at the Cassidy concert, that much I’d picked up from what was said in the car. Mrs. Lewis, well, she was only trying to be helpful, wasn’t she? Any fear my mother might have felt for me caused her less pain than the humiliation of another woman knowing she had lost control of her daughter.

“You really are making a fool of me, Petra,” she said twice on the drive home. I saw Dad’s eyes looking at me in the rearview mirror.

Being shut in my room was not as bad as you’d think. I had my copies of The Essential David Cassidy Magazine in their hidey-hole under the floorboards and the gray transistor radio with its little earphone. I had no one to talk to, but I had plenty of people to sing to me. The Isley Brothers did “Summer Breeze,” and I sang along, quietly as I could, even though I didn’t know how jasmine could get in your mind or what it might smell like. “Kissin’ in the Back Row of the Movies.” The Drifters, it was, and I loved it, even though I’d never kissed anyone anywhere. Because I never had. My favorite song in the charts was “She.” It was like a joke: “So, there was this Welsh girl, locked in a room crying because a French man was singing in English while she was thinking of a boy …” He.

Lonely as a princess in her tower, without enough hair to let down, I had time to think about what had happened, and how I should have seen the way things would work out with Gillian as my new best friend.

The Friday before the concert, I’d gone into the girls’ toilet, and there was Angela standing by the mirror in a prickly haze of the spray she’d just used to stick the wings of her new feather cut to her head. You knew you’d put enough on when the wings were hard as cardboard and stuck out like car indicators. Angela could not have been happier if she’d deliberately set out to ambush me, and I soon found out why.

“Wait till you see what Gillian gave me, Petra.” There was a note of triumph in her voice as she rummaged around in her denim bag, like it was a lucky dip. “Gillian’s really generous, isn’t she?”

In Angela’s hand was the Mary Quant eye-shadow kit. She flicked open the black lacquered top and used the tiny, unused sponge to apply a streak of indigo above her deep-set brown eye.

“Gillian said they were just my colors.”

“Lovely,” I said.

I thought about telling Angela, there and then, that her generous gift had cost most of my Christmas money. But I could see what pleasure it gave her, getting one over on me in the battle for Gillian’s affections, the battle of friendship she must have thought she was losing until she got her hands on the eye-shadow kit. Gillian herself would take too much satisfaction in this envious little drama, planning for the plot to thicken. I felt the strings attached to my limbs twitch, but for the first time I refused to respond to the tug of our beautiful puppet mistress. Poor Angela, so hopeful and happy with that indigo shadow on her eye.

Did I think about David during those three days of solitary? Well, I reviewed the concert in my head, I thought a lot about Sharon and what could have happened, you know. Funny thing was, the person I thought most about was Steven Williams. Sitting on Steven’s knee in the car on the way to the station, with his arm round my shoulder, and wondering whether he meant it, about seeing me around.

On the third day, the front doorbell rang. No one ever visited our house, not really, and if they did they came round the back. The front passage was blocked with boxes and my mother had to move them out of the way to open the door to the headmaster. She was so surprised she actually let him in. Gave Mr. Pugh tea in the front room, from the silver tea set her parents brought over on the boat from Hamburg.

“Petra, please come downstairs to say hello.”

She called me, as though everything was normal, and she wasn’t angry, and I shook Mr. Pugh’s hand, so papery and cool it felt like he had talc on it, not rough and warm like Dad’s hands. The head said it would be a serious disappointment for the school if Petra couldn’t play for Princess Margaret at the opening of the new hall. He understood my hand was still a bit bruised, but the program of events had gone to the printers. You couldn’t mess about with royalty, could you? My mother agreed, flattered to play her part in the VIP schedule.

“The royal family are German, you know, from Hanover,” she announced at breakfast.

“Explains a lot,” said my dad, slipping me a pink envelope under my toast plate.
Dear Petra,

For six months now you’ve been a great friend to me. The best I ever had. And you’ve helped me SO MUCH, honest to God.

I’m sorry things are bad with your mum and I hope she can let buygones be buygones.

I know you will be brilliant in the concert because you always give me the shivers when you talk poetry or play your chello.

Remember what you said in the quiz tiebreaker. “Whatever happens in our lives we will always have David.”

Love,

Sharon
• • •

They told me to start playing the minute the princess walked into the hall, but the plan went wrong because the princess came over and started talking to me.

“How wonderful to be able to play so marvelously well at your age,” the princess said.

Mahhr-velously.

I’d never heard anyone talk like that before. She was tiny, the princess, and her hair was dark brown and piled up on top of her head, lots of curls fastened into place by maids of honor probably. She had a short red dress on with a matching red coat over it and black buttons and patent-leather shoes and handbag. I thought she looked like Elizabeth Taylor with fat knees, but Sharon reckoned more like Sophia Loren. It was really good the princess talked to me because then it got the nerves over with and I was relaxed when I began.

The new hall was absolutely packed with kids and their parents. The excited chatter was so thick you could have cut it like Bara Brith. I tried not to look up, but I could see a few people I knew. My dad had the afternoon off work and he was in his sports jacket, up in the raised seats, just behind Steven Williams. It made me feel funny seeing the two of them so close; two of the best boys’ faces you could ever see, my dad and Steven. I mean it.

Everything went just like Miss Fairfax said it would. My right arm flowing as free as water, back as strong as a tree trunk, feet like roots going into the ground, and my ear searching for—what was it?—the still point of calm in the hall. There it was. I knew where Miss Fairfax was sitting, at the side toward the back, but I didn’t play toward her, I didn’t need to. I carried her in my head, I always would. Instead, I played toward him. Steven. He.

The girl asking the boy to come back to her, quite calmly at first, will you please come back to me? You have no idea how much I want you to come back to me. And then the ecstasy of it. He’s coming back. He’s coming back! Control. Taking control of your emotions, Petra. Each of the notes like a pearl. I think I love you. I think I love you. I think I love you. I think I love you. I think I love YOU.

The headmaster said I was a credit to the school. Miss Fairfax gave a little bow. “One artist to another,” she said. My dad cried. My mother thought that Princess Margaret had put on weight and that she’d let herself go.

“Your mum thinks Helen of blimmin’ Troy let herself go,” said Sharon.

A few days after the concert, I was in the small practice room at school, behind the netball court, when I looked out the window. I was so engrossed in my new piece I had lost track of who and where I was. Walking down the cinder path outside was Steven and my heart pitter-pattered, like it always did when I saw him. I lifted my hand to wave, but pulled it down just in time when I saw who was holding on to Steven’s arm.

Gillian.

Just because she could.
It would be several years before I went up to London on the train again. Next time, I would make the journey alone, just me and my cello, for an interview at the Royal Academy of Music. I thought I was stronger, but my strength had never been tried again, not like it was on that day with Gillian’s group.

There is a photo of all of us taken on the morning of the White City concert. We are standing in front of the ticket office at the station. Angela got a porter to take the picture with her Kodak Instamatic. Carol looks amazing, like a showgirl. Common, my mother would call it. She has blond streaks in the front of her tufty auburn hair, which clash with her red hot pants. On her feet, Carol is wearing white wet-look patent boots, which reveal a chunky expanse of bare, Bisto-brown leg and she is down on one knee in front of the group, with her hands shimmying in the air, and her expression is saying, “Ta-daaa! Just look at us. Aren’t we fabulous?”

Sharon is wearing her new cream sweater coat. The coat looked great on the model in the magazine, but because Sha was little and round, it made her look like a sheep, particularly with that fluffy feather cut she’d had done at the hairdresser in David’s honor. The layers never worked with Sharon’s baby-fine hair, even with all those cans of Silvikrin she bought to hold it in place. I reckon Sharon’s hairspray was responsible for starting the hole in the ozone layer; we never heard about the ozone layer before they invented the feather cut, did we?

She looks so joyful in that photo; that was Sharon’s gift and she shared it generously with those of us who weren’t born with a talent for happiness.

My hair looks even worse than Sha’s. I never did get the hang of blow-drying my new pageboy style, so, the night before White City, I wore curlers to bed to make sure the ends were turned under. I slept on my back like a saint on a tomb. The porcupine pins jabbed my scalp every time I moved. I thought it was worth any suffering to have pretty hair. My hair was one of my good points. You can see a very obvious ridge where the rollers have been. I do not, as I hoped, look like Susan Dey. As for my clothes, I am dressed top to toe in David’s favorite color, which was going to help him pick me out in the crowd, obviously. With my pale complexion I look terrible in brown. I look yellow in brown.

Olga is behind me, standing a little to one side with a thoughtful expression, which always was her stance to the group. Blessed, or cursed, with foreign names, Olga and I were destined to be friends—she was musical, too, a viola player with a strict Russian father. But we shunned each other. It was as if we sensed the combined sum of our otherness would be too much. One weird, foreign-sounding musical girl was an acceptable aberration. Two was a ghetto. I think I would have liked Olga and she would have liked me. Sometimes I saw her smiling into her pencil case at the same things.

At the center of Gillian’s group stands Gillian herself. Angela is lurking alongside with the stricken, resigned look of the best friend who knows that her position is shortly to be advertised in Situations Vacant. In a ruffled chiffon blouse, pristine white flares and a cloche hat with a flower brooch, Gillian has all the sultry nonchalance of Bianca Jagger. The camera looks at her and you can tell it wants to go on looking and looking. Drinking in her beauty. Gillian is the only one of us not attempting a smile. She lets her mouth hang open just a little, as models do. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but Gillian’s face seems to be simmering with the resentment that was about to boil over and burn us all.

There is so much the girls in that picture don’t know. We don’t know that the famous White City of our imagination will be a gray concrete dump reeking of urine. We don’t know that a girl will die. That nearly a thousand will be injured, and that Sharon will be among them. We don’t know, not yet, what love can cost. We were in love with the idea of love. We were trying it out for size. For sighs.
Not long after that photo was taken, my love for David would go out like the tide. Soon I would be embarrassed to admit I ever liked him, just as, for a short time, I had been ashamed of my cello. For my fourteenth birthday, Sharon bought me 10cc’s Original Soundtrack album. It gave me such a thrill, that LP, because it meant that out there were people who heard things the way I heard things. Words and music, pain and joy.

The swollen, fuzzy opening chords of “I’m Not in Love,” with its human-heartbeat drum, were what the thought of real boys had begun to do to every cell of my body.

But I was still grateful to David, always would be, though I didn’t know it then. For being there when no one else was; for giving voice to feelings in me that had barely been born; for helping me to grow up, which is so very, very hard to do. For giving me a boy to love, a boy who could never hurt me; although only because he could never love me back. Could it be forever?

Maybe it could.
At David Cassidy’s White City concert on May 26, 1974, the central section of the 35,000-strong crowd of fans surged forward when Cassidy appeared; many fainted, were trampled upon or were crushed. One St. John Ambulance man said the scale of the injuries reminded him of the Blitz. The director of the British Safety Council called it “a suicide concert.”

Some 750 girls were treated for hysteria or injuries on the night. A few days later, 14-year-old fan Bernadette Whelan, who had been unconscious since the hysterical crush, became the first fatality at a British pop concert.

David Cassidy sent a letter of regret to Bernadette’s parents, but did not attend the funeral for fear of causing another riot.

At the inquest, the coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death as a result of asphyxiation. He said that Bernadette was “a victim of contrived hysteria” and suggested that “trendy, high platform shoes” were a contributing factor to the number of girls who fell over in the throng.

David Cassidy retired soon afterward. He was 24.