I Think I Love You

17

I was the real David Cassidy. Oh, sure, there was this other guy: the one who sang the songs, who got the girls, who wore the shirts, who broke the hearts. But the story of David Cassidy really had very little to do with pop music, or pop culture, or even the culture of fame; it was something much simpler than that. It was a love story. And I wrote it.

I left university in 1973 with a degree, a girlfriend and a half share in a Mini Clubman. It turned out that I had only a half share in the girlfriend, too, and that she preferred the other half, but it took a shouting match in a mews off Bayswater, at three o’clock in the morning, to learn the truth. My degree was in English, with particular emphasis on the Romantic poets. Proof that I had gained it came with a diploma, in a roll of fake vellum, and a blank space where my future was meant to be.

Not only did Keats fail to get me a job: he practically guaranteed that no one would employ me. Employers would sit there with my one-page, double-spaced CV on the desk between us, curl their lips and pronounce the words English Literature as if they were saying “criminal convictions” or “known perversions.” Clearly, they thought that I would arrive on the first day with a cape and a quill pen. Whereas what I wanted, more than anything, was to put Keats behind me: to escape from the cage of his life and loves into the freedom of my own. And, if that meant making the coffee, that was fine by me. Girls drank coffee. That much I knew.
Bill closed his file, and then his laptop. This simple action, as always, triggered a twofold reaction within him: the need for a cigarette, and the deeper need for a drink. The fact that he hadn’t smoked in twenty years, and hadn’t been drunk in ten, was of no consequence at all. What mattered was that smoking and drinking were the kinds of things that writers were meant to do—reflex behaviors that were supposed to kick in at the foot of every page, or even the completion of a paragraph. They were badges of bad conduct, pinned to the writing to give it some extra shine. When you saw a photograph of a novelist, and he was seated at a typewriter, breathing through a Marlboro, with a tumbler of scotch at his elbow and the light of early morning at his back—well, it was 60 proof, was it not? The guy had earned his style; his books must be hard-won, ground out on a battlefield of booze and badly injured hearts. How could you take seriously the thoughts of a writer who survived on tea and biscuits?

Bill was ashamed of himself, automatically thinking he, but there was nothing he could do about it; when he thought of writing, it was the image of his fellow man that fell into his head. Part of him, he guessed, was stuck in 1973, when an author was still a guy in jeans, or, if dead, in a frock coat with a well of black ink to match the scotch. Imagine George Eliot, growling over her uneaten breakfast, fumbling to slit open the day’s first pack of Lucky Strikes, one hand rubbing her stubble, trying not to sniff the reek of last night’s breath, her own bad atmosphere …

All the smartest people Bill knew were women. He thought of Marie in the office. Women alone seemed to keep the traffic flowing smoothly between their brains and mouths, whereas men were all gridlock and diversions and dead ends. When it came to communication, men were manholes. And, it went without saying, they didn’t read; they didn’t read men, and they sure as hell didn’t read women. A few men, like monks, still read, but they didn’t talk to other men about the books they’d read, and, if they read good books, they stashed them away like pornography. Just think if they read poems: under the bedclothes, with a torch, while their wives slept uneasily beside them.

When had men stopped reading? When had men become anti-reading, or reading become anti-men? Maybe the rumor had gone round, Bill thought, that books were good for you, like fruit or yoga or going to church. They nourished and sustained you. In other words, they were a bad idea. Maybe the only way that men would ever read, now, was government action. The government could start banning books, beginning with the good ones. Ban them and burn them, deny them and shred them to bits. Then men would want them again. A book would be like crack, or adultery, or treason; a book would be bad for you. And that would be a good thing.

And through it all, licking a forefinger and turning a page, the women would go on reading. Of all the smart women Bill knew, most were readers. And what they read, for the most part, was other women. When they weren’t too busy with their own lives, which was most of the time, they read about the lives of other women, most of whom, as far as Bill could work out, were even busier than they were, though whether that was meant to rebuke them or console them, he had no idea.

His flat was in a converted warehouse near Tower Bridge, a seven-minute walk from the office and with a partial view of the river. It had been a convenient stopgap; eleven years later it sometimes felt like home. Bill looked around his living room. It was tidy, he guessed, and welcoming; there were no carpet stains or unidentified burns or food remains; it was, recognizably, the place where a professional adult would seek to unwind, at the close of the day. But it was also, in some unmistakable way, a place where women did not come—or had not come of late, or come enough. There were books, but none left lying facedown, their spines cracked, the wings of their pages crinkled and spread. That was another thing he would never understand about women: how they could bear to read in the bath, a novel propped in the soap tray, with steam rising and turning the fiction to pulp.

Here, though, in this room, the books were sentry-neat, like an army of knowledge. Only one was missing; you could see its place on the shelf, a dark gap. Now it was laid flat on the coffee table with a marker in it, beside the stack of magazines, and Bill couldn’t read its title from where he was sitting, at his desk, though he knew it as well as his own name, and he knew where the author had taken it from, under cover of darkness. Other people’s thoughts and feelings, long before, grew into poems, and bits of those poems drifted into the minds of novelists, and the novels sat on the coffee tables of men too tired and preoccupied with other things, like bringing out magazines, to think about the feelings that they themselves might once have had, long before. “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies …”

Bill went to the kitchen. Last year he had had a new one put in. German. It cost only slightly less than his father earned over ten years when he was trying to keep a family of five. He ran his hand over the granite worktop and smiled weakly at the folly of the industrial faucet, like a python made of steel. Who was he kidding? A tap that had enough pressure to douse the Great Fire of London would only ever be called upon to sluice Bill’s morning toast plate. He looked at the shelf of bottles, some never opened; who, in the course of human history, had asked for apricot brandy? All those drinks for guests, lovers, party-goers: people who liked to reminisce at length, others keen to forget. There were no cigarettes in the house. He made himself a cup of tea, took two biscuits, sat down at the table and began to dunk. Nothing was in his head. When he had finished, he tipped the dregs of grainy swill down the sink and paused. Then he left the kitchen, trailed past the living room like a sleepwalker, pushed open a door and flicked a switch.

Music ran round the room; along and up and down, as though on a stave. LPs at the far end, huddled together in stacks, their spines rubbed and unreadable even if you went up close. Elsewhere, CDs by the hundred, the thousand. And out of sight, in sliding drawers, at ground level, cassettes, in heaps of six, some of them ringed with elastic bands. Cassettes, what a joke: plastic shells with broken corners that rattled like dried peas. Designed to be dropped and lost down the sides of car seats; but designed, too, to contain everything that you loved about a band, or, better still, everything that you could cook up by mixing one band that you loved with a dozen others, to make a compilation that you would pass on to friends. In mid-1972, Bill had felt the same way about compilation tapes that others felt about the National Gallery; in some ways, he still did. He opened a drawer and took out a batch of tapes. There was an index card, visible through the clear casing, with a song on each line. The first words he read were Floyd, Pink. Bill snorted, and then looked round quickly, as if an intruder had broken in with the specific purpose of watching a middle-aged man laughing at his pompous younger self.

Christ, had he really been that bad? It didn’t say much for the frenzy of Mr. Finn. How could music send you, spirit you out of yourself and into the stratosphere, if you filed it away afterward under Floyd, Pink? Bill wondered what on earth he must have done with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young: four separate catalogs, presumably, or maybe four cubed. Sixty-four. What had happened to his record collection when one of them peeled away and became Young, Neil? A surprise, really, that the whole system hadn’t melted down.

Once, some years ago, he had brought a woman home. They had met at a party just before Christmas, and talked, not about music but about plenty of other, less contentious things. He remembered, for some reason, that she had worn a black velvet jacket, cut like a man’s tuxedo, with a white shirt and a double string of pearls; someone in passing, carrying drinks, had told her she looked lovely, and she had said, “I feel like a male impersonator,” and seen Bill’s smile. She offered to give him a lift home, and had said, as her car dawdled at his curb, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me to come in? It is Christmas, you know.”

Flustered, and not quite seeing the connection, he had done as she said. In her breezy, confident manner, she had walked around his flat, inspecting it before committing herself, while he wrestled with the coffee machine in the kitchen: the standard rigmarole, more sad than funny, of consenting adults who have already decided to go to bed, and know it, but must nonetheless go through the motions of a cursory, well-mannered courtship, even though the coffee will, in all probability, remain undrunk.

She had called out comments on her brief tour, pausing to laugh, as was required, at the spartan fixtures of his bathroom. Then there was complete silence. He had said her name. (What was her name? Bill was dismayed at his memory these days, with its rough patches and holes. Helen? Harriet? He could see the pearls, still, but the name had lost its luster and disappeared.) Then he had turned off the coffee machine and gone in search of her. She was standing in the doorway of the music room, gazing at the massed ranks, and at the hi-fi that squatted, like a black stove, where a fireplace had once been. “Your music,” she had said, “is all in order.”

“Yes,” Bill had replied. That was when he’d made his mistake. He had thought order was something to be proud of. “Chronological within thematic within alphabetical. So, taking Bob Dylan, say, first we go to D …” He had stopped.

She’d looked at him oddly and tilted her head, like a mother considering someone else’s strange child, and said, “I think I’d better go.” And she had gone. He had listened to her car drive away, then made the coffee and listened to Dylan till dawn. Desolation Row …

Bill hadn’t thought of the Pearl Woman for a long while. He was sure she hadn’t thought of him once, after that evening, other than to raise him as a comical species, a full-grown punch line, among other women, for a week’s worth of lunches and drinks. “ ‘First we go to D …’ No we don’t, matey. You’re not even getting to A tonight, believe me …”

No chance of finding her now, ever, to say sorry, and to confess that now he, too, had gotten the joke. Better late than never. How could you retrace your steps like that, back into the past? Not hook up briefly, or rekindle, but truly find the old path, into the woods? He replaced the tapes, turned off the light and closed the door, then ambled back to his laptop. Its screen glowed at him, in the dimly lit room, like a window in a city by night.
I replied to an ad in the Evening Standard. I didn’t expect to get the job; I’m not sure I even wanted it. I remember leaving the interview, where the exact nature of the work—and the name of the pretty boy at the heart of it—had, for the first time, become clear. I could have stood up and declared to the interviewer, “Madam, I spit on your offer of toil, be it ne’er so well remunerated. I bid you good day.” Instead of which, I said yeah, okay. The music meant nothing, I reasoned, but the money sounded good.

That evening, I went to see my girlfriend. I shall call her Rachel. Knowing that I had been for an interview, she asked how it had gone. Well, I said. Offered the job on the spot. From now on, she could introduce me as a music journalist. Result: the very words made her melt. Her own job was steadier, and better paid, but this—and remember, we are talking 1974—had the edge in glamour.

“Who will you get to write about?”

“Oh, you know: Plant, Page, Clapton. Maybe James Brown, if he’s over.”

Consider the scene: not only was I lying about the strength of my wish to meet proper, hairy rock stars; I was lying in the full knowledge that I never would meet them, because I would be too busy writing about a smooth-chinned pop goblin whom I fervently hoped I wouldn’t have to meet at all. My secret boy, of whom she must never know.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting at my desk, staring at a heap of correspondence. “Zoe,” I said to my boss, “these are from girls to David.”

“What do they want?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing much. Promises of undying love for them and them alone. Offers of marriage. His hanky. His horses in Hawaii. His favorite color. Things like that.”

“Yes,” said Zoe, “the usual.” I asked her what to do with them. “Do?” she replied. “Answer them, of course. Not personally. Just draft some general replies and give them to me. I’m having the page made up in a mo. We just call it ‘A Letter from David.’ ”

I looked at her, like a child being prodded onto the stage in a nativity play for the first time. Then I said, in a small voice: “But I’m not him.”

And Zoe smiled back. “You are now, darling,” she said. And so I was. And you know what? It was easy. I took the first letter. It was the one about David’s favorite color. Obviously, I would have to dig around to find the answer; there had to be one, after all. Everybody had a favorite color. I went and asked a colleague. “What’s Cassidy’s favorite color? Where can I look it up?” He sneered at me and said something like: “Don’t look it up, wanker. MAKE it up.”

Still, I was uneasy. This was journalism, after all, not fiction. Wasn’t it? As a compromise, I gave David my own favorite color, forgetting that it might not be the most convincing choice, because I was color-blind. I turned back to my typewriter and wrote: “Hi there, girls! People often ask me for my favorite color. So I have to tell you my favorite color is brown.”
Bill sat back and thought about Ruth. What would happen if she picked up a copy of the magazine, in three months’ time, and saw his article, and recognized herself? Bill didn’t know whether he was revolving this idea in his head because he feared the consequences, or because he wished for them—wanted her to think of him in return, search for him, find a number, call him up … “Bill, hi. It’s, um, Ruth. Ruth from before. You know, David Cassidy days. I read your piece, and I couldn’t help …”
There was more. I didn’t just deliver the holy writ of David Cassidy. I put together the Bible. I learned to design a page and lay out text. I learned how to cut and paste, though not with a scroll and the click of a mouse; in those days, cutting meant scissors and paste meant a pot of something so white, rank and gloopy that we convinced ourselves it must have come from a sperm whale. To me it stank of boiled bones, but that was not disgusting enough for my fellow pasters. “Probably the sperm,” one of them put it; “sperm whale sperm.” And from that moment on our pot of adhesive was labeled Moby-Dick. “Pass the Moby,” we would say to one another, breathing through our mouths.

When millions of human beings remember David Cassidy, they think of a voice, and then of—I don’t know, the burning smell of their old hair dryers, perhaps, from the time when they got themselves dolled up for this unavailable pop star while reading our magazine. And me? Well, I must be the only person who, whenever the word Cassidy crops up in conversation, thinks “Moby-Dick.” And vice versa.
Bill felt a key turn inside his head. Something like that; something released. He hadn’t found that glue smell at the back of his senses, under all the other rubbish, for nearly twenty-five years, yet here it was, set free by a few idle words. Bill didn’t write these days, not unless you counted Post-it notes, stuck on the side of the computer or the front of a fridge. And e-mails, of course: the rosaries of the twentieth century—an endless clicking of fingers, unique to each soul, sending off complaints, regrets and pleas into the unknown, hoping they find their mark. But that wasn’t writing. He hadn’t written anything longer in years, not even a letter of condolence; a letter of any kind, in ink, would be as unthinkable, as physically unmanageable, as writing the kind of poems he tried to write at college, to girls whose names never seemed to rhyme with anything. What word chimes with Bethany or Jenny? Or Pippa, except a stripper? Or Amanda, outside a limerick? Or Ruth, forsooth?

Ruth. Bill had no idea where she was living these days. He tried not to put an even more fearful suggestion to himself, the kind that came at night: What if she was not living at all? Contact had been lost soon after they split, and, without many mutual friends, it would have been hard to restore.

One true love. Is that the ration allotted to everybody? There was that old myth, wasn’t there, some creaky Greek legend about each person being a half, like half of a broken pot, and life being a question of watching and waiting, wandering the earth, hoping for your other half to show up and slip into place. A perfect fit, to make a whole. If that was so, Bill was still waiting; whether he was still watching was another matter. He had ceased to look. Ruth had come as close as anyone, but they both knew that the edges had not really locked together; there were shards missing, it was not quite right.

Bill had read enough of his own women’s magazines to know that it’s never quite right, there is no perfect fit, and your best bet is to spend a lifetime with someone, smoothing the edges, making repairs, getting used to the cracks. Then, with luck, as the end nears, you might suddenly realize that the pot has been finished, and that two have become one.

And what about those girls, the ones who read his David Cassidy thoughts each week? They had been sure of their one true love; the fact that millions of them had the same true love didn’t seem to bother them. Clearly, David was the perfect fit for all sizes. That woman who had come into the office the other day: the batty old Welsh girl, one of the receptionists had called her—except that, when she arrived, she didn’t seem batty at all. Or old. One of the least mad people that Bill had ever met, though the Welsh part was true. Petra. And the way she talked about her past, her Cassidy days, as if she knew how mad she must have seemed at the time, and yet was not prepared to disown it now—refusing to take the easy adult option, and dismiss her yesteryears. Better to cling to one’s youthful foolishness, surely, and argue for its importance, for its lasting place in the heart, rather than pretend it had never happened … Love had been true, for Petra, utterly true, even if the truth was made up. Bill wondered what would happen when and if she found out that he, a lout of a literature student, had done most of the inventing. He hoped she wouldn’t scratch his eyes out. She didn’t look the type. She didn’t look any type at all. She seemed like herself.
So, where did it all go wrong? David and me? Did he go cool on me, or find someone else; or did I force the issue, saying I needed the space?

I really did need the space; when I found myself crammed into White City, in May 1974, at David’s final London concert, with teenage girls all around me, fainting not with excitement but because the crush was breaking their bones and, in one case, squeezing the life from their bodies, I wanted out. I remember walking away that night, away from the stadium, gulping down lungfuls of air.

Not long after that, David Cassidy quit. Not long after that, The Essential David Cassidy Magazine also called it a day; the right choice, I guess, on the grounds that it’s hard to maintain a church when the god has announced his retirement.

Where, I wondered, did the congregation go? Into their grown-up lives: taking exams and jobs and husbands; first filing away their David posters and clippings, with their copies of my magazine, and then, somewhere along the way, just losing them, in attics and house moves. How appalled they would have been, as thirteen-year-olds, to think that there could ever, ever come a day when they wouldn’t know, or even mind, where their most treasured possessions were—that three-speed record player, that unscratched copy of Cherish …

I never did have that album. I never bought a David Cassidy record; to be brutal, I can’t swear that I ever sat down and listened to a David Cassidy song—not all the way through, from intro to fade-out. Oh, I knew the songs all right, but that’s because I had photocopies of the inner sleeves Sellotaped to the wall above my desk. Whenever inspiration flagged, I would raise my eyes to the lyrics in front of me, steal a phrase, and hammer it into my latest piece of Davidry. “Cherish is the word I use to describe / all the feeling that I have hiding here for you inside.”

How hard is it to work that into a letter? Christ, it sounds like a letter to begin with. The guy was doing my work for me.
Bill stopped and went to a cupboard next to the bathroom, pulling it open to reveal a heap of suitcases. He yanked them out, one by one, taken aback by his own haste. At the back, under a rolled sleeping bag, there was a cardboard box. He lugged it back to the living room and delved. It was full of clippings, as yellow as old skin. He flicked through them fast, dropping some onto the carpet. At last he paused, a small magazine in his hand. He took it back to the desk, smoothed it out, and began to type again.
It’s so fantastic to feel the cool water closing over my hot, citified body! And then I just lie there on the side of the pool, drying off and looking down across the valley. It sure is a magnificent sight …

Not me drying off! The valley, I mean!
Only now, at this distance, could Bill grasp the full strangeness of his first job. Petra had gotten him thinking about it. Who would he rather have been, himself or David? By the age of twenty-four, Bill’s career was taking off. Cassidy’s, having flown a thousand times higher, was over, or in free fall. Not for him the normal arc of a life: a stumbling start, moving toward some distant peak that you finally reached in your middle years, even though the goal, once attained, might not seem worth the climb.

What must it be like to enjoy your finest hour before you turn thirty? Keats. All those books of poetry, scrawled upon by night, and shelved in shame when Bill put away childish things to enter the world of work, turned out to have been right all along. They held the clue, to love and fame alike. And the pop star, burning bright and fading fast, turned out to be little more than a rewrite of the Romantic poet. If Cassidy had died at White City—if he, not his fan, had been smothered in the crush—might it have been for the best? Wouldn’t he have been made immortal, trapped at his moment of perfection?
The fate of the teen idol is the fate of beautiful girls down the ages. The idol has to be seen as virginal but highly desirable. Desirable, yet untouched.
Mind you, Cassidy was still alive, older and wiser with some sharp things to say about his condition, and good luck to him. He had gotten married, Bill knew that much. Two times, maybe three. The first must have been when he was still in his decompression chamber, recovering from global celebrity. Kay someone. A small blonde with cheeks like a peach. “Peachy-creamy,” as Bill’s Aunt Rita used to say, when asked how she was. Rita, in summer frocks for two-thirds of the year, married to Uncle Douglas, who used to stoop down, as if his waist were hinged, and gravely present Bill with a birthday fiver. One year, the banknote rustled a little as he placed it in the boy’s grateful hand. A year later, the rustle was a shake, the paper trembling and rattling against Bill’s palm, and then Douglas was not there anymore; his tall frame confined to a chair, and finally a bed, the spasms—so Bill heard from a whispering cousin—grown uncontrolled. Rita, by then, was a ghost of a woman, soot dark around the eyes, exhausted by the love she had given to her man, once lofty, now quaking and unhinged. Yet still, at Christmas, unaccompanied, she wore butter yellow or Mediterranean blue, and smiled as she handed round the plates. “Peachy-creamy, thank you, Bill,” she would say.

Who had Bill loved? Who did he want to take care of, once Ruth had disappeared? He had made love, God knows, sometimes not for weeks, or even months, and then in a fever of entanglements and three-timings; dressing quietly at dawn, in an Edinburgh hotel, while one woman slept, in order to catch a train to London and a lunchtime tryst with another, who stood in her hallway as he came in, wearing court shoes and nothing more, and received him there, pulling him into her, against the rain-damp coats. Then dinner with an old friend, unhappy now, requiring consolation. Bill had gone to bed that night, alone, feeling like an exhausted oil well, and slept for thirteen hours.

Or that Italian beauty, too beautiful for him, no name; maybe she hadn’t seen him well, maybe that distracted mist in her violet eyes had been a myopic blur; finding themselves in front of the same painting, in, where was it? Milan, perhaps, when he had ninety minutes of museum-graze between meetings? Talking sotto voce about the picture, as you do, as if in church, she in her halting English, Bill in his backward Italian; then a pause, a look passed back and forth, then downstairs, don’t rush, quiet marble corridors, heels clacking, finally an unlocked room, found and opened and locked from inside, Bill knocking over a mop or a broom, the beauty trying not to laugh out loud, then turning her face to the wall and raising, almost primly, the hem of her dress. What was it, seven, eight years ago? Didn’t feel real, now, from this distance.

That was the thing with making love; over time, it took on the finished feeling of a story, or the gleam of a film, like something that had happened to someone else. (With love itself, the true love of legend, the opposite was true; as it grew, you could no longer imagine yourself without it. The love made you.) Sex opened up a rift from the world, rendered it redundant for a minute, or a month. Three days on the trot, once, in London, 1981, missing the royal wedding completely; getting out of bed to pee in the basin, hungry as lions, with no time to eat; who had been that devourer? Mary, that was it, saintly Mary, with the haircut of a principal boy, like Peter Pan, who had been with him for six weeks in all, and had never met any of his friends.

Then there was Melody. Lord help us, Melody. Bill still smiled, when he thought of his mate Pete the Pimple, informed over a pint that Bill had met a girl named Melody.

“You have got to be kidding,” Pete said. “Bill, that’s not a girl. That’s a record label. That’s a shampoo. That’s half a f*cking magazine.”

In those days, everyone, but everyone, read Melody Maker and New Musical Express, and so, of course, from that day in the pub to the end of the relationship, Pete and all his mates had called Melody NME. To her face.

“How’s it going, NME?” they would chorus as she drifted in, long skirt frilling the floor, and drank her barley wine. One time she came to a football match carrying a flute. Melody believed that in a previous life she had been an Egyptian cat, and her lovemaking was certainly feline, all sensual, selfish ease mixed with mad voracity. “Sleeping with the NME,” as Pete observed. Bill, despairing of her finding a job, had forced her to fill in a careers questionnaire, only to come back three hours later and discover that, under the heading, “Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she had written the single word Waterfall.

Melody had wafted off, like a cirrus cloud, one afternoon, and such had been the relief that it wasn’t until two weeks later that Bill, checking his bank balance, realized she had taken the lot.

By then, Bill was busy working for Puzzle Time, which sold more solidly, and made more money, for Nightingale Publishing than all but three of its other titles. He managed six months before moving sideways to another journal, and then, a year later, to another, but always within the same parent company. He was becoming a corporate child. And still, on dank Friday evenings, without even time for a bath, he would lug his guitar case from behind the sofa, or from under the vacuum cleaner, and hurry to Kentish Town or unfindable church halls off Tooting Broadway, to play in bands that seemed to change name, identity and purpose even more frequently than he changed jobs.

The most enduring, from 1975 to 1978, and still the most inexcusable, had been Green’s Leaf, Bill’s one and only foray into prog rock. He had been bandless and uneasy for a year, with Ruth gone and his other love, Spirit Level, cast to the winds. Spirit Level had lasted so long, and weathered so much, and put such heroic effort into never improving, despite an unceasing change of cast, that Bill presumed it could never die; for him, it was like playing in goal for a hopeless but venerable football club that would never rise beyond the Fourth Division. Then came the news: not one but two of its members, secretly and independently, had decided to sit accountancy exams, and had in fact met, face-to-face, at the door of the municipal sports hall where the exams were being taken. Both wore suits. The horror of this coincidence had, not unnaturally, finished the band.

And so Bill had drifted, and played Hendrix records, until introduced one day to a trio of private-school boys. Of course they were private-school boys: that was the deal, with prog rock. It was easier to fantasize about mystical England if you could look out of your dormitory window and see Glastonbury. Or Wenlock Edge. Bill’s secondary school had been directly opposite a pet-food store called Rruff Trade.

The private-school boys were the same age as him, but still boys; still looking, behind their sheepish manes, as if waiting to be told to get their hair cut. When only fifteen, with voices barely broken, two of them, Roger and Miles, had formed a folk duo by the name of Pen-dragon. Then a third, Piers, had come in the sixth form, with his own drum kit, and they had grown—or “matured,” as Miles liked to say—into Stone Circle. Now, with Bill, their pet proletarian, on bass, they were Green’s Leaf, and none of their songs lasted less than nine minutes. Sometimes Miles would go away in the middle of one of Roger’s yowling, interminable guitar solos and change costume, reemerging for the finale dressed as an ash tree. For “Golden Bole” he hummed the middle eight with a lightbulb inside his mouth, switched on. Bill would be at the side of the stage, defiantly clad in T-shirt and jeans, twanging along, his mind continents away. “David Cassidy was better than this,” he said to himself, out loud, to the mirror in the backstage toilet, and then bowed his head in shame. Because it was true.

For one thing, Cassidy kept it short. Maybe not always sweet, but short. Say what you like about “Cherish,” it was all over inside two and a half minutes. No wonder a pop song was called a number. Green’s Leaf didn’t have numbers, they had equations; and the sum of those equations was, as Pete the Pimple pointed out, “zero shagging.”

By now, the room was nothing but shadow. Bill groped back to his computer.
Life can be brutal for the teen idol who tries to grow up. His job is to remind his fans of lost innocence, not their advancing years.

Donny Osmond recalled that, once the posters were torn down and “Puppy Love” had faded, he was ridiculed for his lack of cool. Desperate to shed a goody-goody image, Donny engaged a publicist who suggested faking a drug bust to establish some street credibility. The problem was, Donny didn’t do drugs or caffeine or even premarital sex.

“Do I need to make mistakes to be thought of as interesting?” he asked. “In my mind, I’ve been to the darkest places you can possibly imagine, but physically I don’t want to go there.”

Teen idols can still go on touring into their thirties, forties and even fifties, but, as the hairline recedes and the waist thickens, the venues diminish in grandeur from stadium to concert hall to school gym to pub.

It would be a mistake to think that David Cassidy was something new. He was, for a heartbeat, the biggest thing in the world, but, when he stopped beating, others replaced him, just as he himself had followed earlier beats. When millions of girls screamed for Cassidy—and, trust me, this was real screaming, cavegirl-crazy—they thought that there had never been or ever would be anyone like him, just as their desire for him was unique and unrepeatable, every girl’s howl and sob as particular to her as her own sneeze or—still to come—her orgasmic cry.

Whereas, of course, the poor bloke was perched uncertainly, in his spangly catsuit, on the shoulders of giants. Before him there had been—to take only the unembarrassing examples, and leaving aside the Monkees and Johnnie Ray—the Beatles, and then Elvis, and then Sinatra.

The bobby-soxers who waited in line for the young Sinatra felt the planet tipped in their favor by his presence. There was a day in wartime, October in New York, when they were allowed to keep their seats, for an all-day session of Frank on-screen and Frank in person, as long as they continued to occupy them. This was not a wise ruling; most of those girls would happily have stayed in those seats, leaned back, given birth, raised mini-Franks and died there. And so, of the thirty-six hundred who began the day, only two hundred and fifty departed. You don’t walk out on Frank. To their eyes, and on the evidence of their ears, he had been put on earth to pitch his woo at them, and they were born with a view to catching it, and hugging it close, and yelling back that, yes, they were all his.

And David Cassidy? Same deal—with a fraction of the Sinatra voice, but with the same Bambi appeal. The screams remained the same. And what if David had stopped and turned round, mid-chorus, and pointed a finger at some likely lass and said, “All right, then. If you’re mine, can I have you?” What would she have done, apart from swooned? Well, as a matter of fact, we know the answer to that.

I was one of the few male buyers, I suspect, of Cassidy’s autobiography, C’mon, Get Happy …, when it came out in 1994. That makes me, I would also guess, one of the few readers who were undismayed. It seems safe to presume that most of the people who rushed to get the book were fans of the artist formerly known as David; they didn’t particularly want to know about his marriage, or his comebacks (which they would avidly attend, nevertheless, in any city, anytime); they weren’t interested in now. They wanted then. They wanted reports from the front line of 1973, when the battle for David was in full spate. They wanted reassurance that their love had been, though unrequited, worth every tear, every sleepless night beneath the giant poster and every scream.

And what did they read? Stuff about how David was fascinated with women who really enjoyed the art of oral sex. That he rarely had any emotional connection with the girls he slept with, even comparing it to masturbation.

Forget unrequited love. The guy was requiting all over the shop. He was requiting backstage, in his hotel suite, on the hoof. And what I longed to know was this: What was it like for the women who crossed the threshold? Were they disillusioned to the core, devastated by the brief reality, or did they realize that this was, logically, where all the illusions he sang about were bound to conclude?

It’s important, at this point, to get our demographics right. Cassidy confesses to a great deal of action, most, if not all, of it from people down on their knees, like worshippers; but he also, by his own admission, went for older fans—women of the world, not young girls new to it. He recalls turning down a beautiful fourteen-year-old who wanted her first time to be with David Cassidy. For a deity, he was remarkably kind and considerate. So maybe the mystery is doomed to be unsolved; we never can know what the teenage fans, the readers of my magazine, would have done if presented with the flesh of true romance, because they never had access. They were free, in other words, to shout out their desire, because it would never be satisfied. Their screams were dreams.

Beyond this point, I find myself in the dark. No man has ever known a woman’s thoughts …
Bill stopped. Once you find yourself admitting defeat in a piece, it is always time to stop. And if you don’t, he thought, his tired mind twisting back on itself, you get Clare. Clare, light of my life, fire of my loins; “waste of your time, more like,” as Pete preferred to call it, once the whole thing was over.

Brisk and bracing as a walk on a frosty day; Clare with her portfolio of international clients and her regulation three orgasms, one before, thank you, one during, one to finish, together if possible please. Hair pinned up with no need of a mirror as she spruced herself in the morning, catching the Tube to Bank before Bill was even awake. An affair, yes; a stretch of efficient pleasure, in the capable hands of Clare; but married, for ten years … How had that happened? How had Bill allowed it to happen? Even now, he could barely summon the era, re-create its contours in his head; it was less of an event, more of an absence, a desert where two people, compatible enough, were said to have been together, by no means unhappily, but where they seem to have left no trace.

What was that Fitzgerald story? Last one in the book, where one guy meets another, a former acquaintance, and tries to work out where he’s been for so long, out of the fray. Abroad, or sick, or just away? Turns out he’d been drunk. How did the line go? “Jesus. Drunk for ten years.” Well, that was how Bill felt, sometimes; not resentful, quite mild in his way, but sad and quizzical nonetheless. Jesus. Married for ten years. “The Lost Decade,” that’s what the story was called.

Clare had been quite firm about not wanting kids. And he had gone along with it, not wishing to force the issue, as it were, while noticing, as if out of the corner of his eye, how much he enjoyed being Uncle Bill to his six nieces. From the outside, Clare and Bill had the gleam of success. They had risen through their ranks: she, to high office in the temple of investment, a priestess whose rites he never claimed to understand; he, “Magazine Man,” as Clare would say with a third of a smile, leafing his way through the ever-shinier pages of one title after the next, until he was senior enough—“sufficiently wanky,” in the words of Pete, when they met up near work—to take off his shirt and tie and wear a top of black knitted silk instead, buttoned to the neck, beneath his suit.

He had seen the Welshwoman, Petra, looking at him the other day and sizing him up; taking in the clothes, the loafers (soundless, on the office carpet), even the lacquer of his fountain pen, and—he had never felt the force of the phrase before now—getting the measure of him. Like an entomologist with a beetle, still alive. She would have tapped his shell if she could, to find out if there was anything inside. There was a look in her eyes he couldn’t place. She was the polar opposite of a groupie, that was for sure. Whatever those older women had done to David Cassidy, wanting him without knowing him, without knowing why, it was the opposite of what Petra was after, with her visitor’s pass and her twenty-four-year-old letter.

She was not on her knees; Welshwoman stood straight and looked at Magazine Man. She did not altogether like what she saw, he was sure of that. But then Bill did not always like what he saw, whenever he caught sight of himself. In a glass, darkly. He had put away childish things, and he kept fearing—half hoping—that they would start to reappear. Flashes and eruptions of young William, in the sagging face of Mr. Finn. Did Petra think such thoughts? Can two people think the same thing without knowing it?

Strange that he should wonder about her. Met her for—what?—an hour or two at the most. Yet she had struck him—really struck, in the way that you do a gong, or a chord—and the sound would not die away. He could see her now, in detail, conjure her more exactly from those few minutes than he could Clare, his other half, with whom he had spent a decade. Clare was misting over, and this stranger—this other other—was growing clearer by the hour. Petra. Lost and found. Tender is the night. Ruth and Melody and Clare. The Pearl Woman. Spirit Level and Green’s Leaf. David Cassidy and Puzzle Time. Petra. I claim my prize.