I Think I Love You

19

He is five minutes late. Five minutes and twenty-four years. The Welshwomen, for the second time in their lives, are surrounded by their love rivals. It’s not as big a crowd as turned out for David at White City in 1974, maybe only a few hundred, and there are no screams tonight, just the occasional shriek, as if someone had seen a mouse, followed by gales of embarrassed womanly laughter. Looking round the audience, Petra is surprised at how emotional she feels. Jet lag may be making her feel a bit weepy, but it’s more than that. Many of the women here look like survivors. She can see at least two whose tufted baldness shows that they have had cancer, and may still have it. All of the Cassidy girls have entered the age of grief, that time when life’s losses start to stack up. Few will have been spared. Count yourself lucky if you get to your mid-thirties without knowing death, divorce or other species of grief.

Some of the fans have brought their daughters along, and Petra suddenly wishes Molly were by her side. When they spoke on the phone earlier, Mol reported happily that Carrie had made her waffles and maple syrup for breakfast. She loves anything American because it brings her closer to Leo DiCaprio.

“Love you, Mum,” Molly said. It was worth flying thousands of miles just to hear that. Petra thinks of emotion recollected in tranquillity, of all the women like her in this auditorium who are looking back on their thirteen-year-old selves, on the pressure of all that yearning. Wanting to be loved so badly. That was the great engine of life, revving up back then, if only they’d known it. And how many are thinking of what happened, and what didn’t happen, in the years between then and now?

“Where is he?” she asks. “Why isn’t he here yet?”

“Oh, he’ll be here,” said Sharon. “Don’t you worry.”

“Oh, I’m not worried. He’s a grown-up, he can take care of himself. D’you think any men are really grown up?”

Sharon thinks about it. “Well, I thought my dad was, but then I caught him on the PlayStation with David—”

“Your David. Not this one.”

“My David, yeah. We don’t really get David Cassidy coming round too often to play Donkey Kong. Funny, that.”

“Marcus never came to any of my recitals. I mean, what else is he doing with his life? What’s so important that he couldn’t come and listen to a thirty-year-old Welshwoman playing Debussy on a Tuesday lunchtime? In a crypt?”

“Too busy with his Donkey Kong, that’s what I heard.” One of the best things about Sharon, Petra had long thought, was that she genuinely found her own jokes more appealing than anyone else’s. There was no ill will toward other people, not a trace of selfishness; in her eyes, she was just funnier. She laughed now, and the sound of it—clear as a bell, dirty as a rugby match—turned heads all along their row.

“Shh now, everyone’s looking at us,” said Petra.

“Pet, this is Las Vegas. There are lions in the lobby. Real live ones. No one’s gonna look at us, are they?”

“They’re not in the lobby. Not like chatting to the concierge.”

“No, but did you see them in that bit with the glass ceiling? Got the shock of my life, I did, when I looked up. Like bloody Daktari in here it is.”

“It’s because it’s MGM.”

“What?”

“You know, like the lion that roars at the start of the films? That’s why they have them here.”

“Oh, right you are,” said Sharon. “Tell you what—lucky it isn’t J. Arthur Rank, eh? Look up and see some nudie bloke in a nappy banging his gong.”

“I’m sure it can be arranged, ma’am.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, the MGM Grand Las Vegas is proud to present …” As the voice boomed, the lights died down.

“Where is he?” Petra said again.

“Just coming, isn’t he? Just getting into his catsuit. Probably a bit tight these days. Needs a shoehorn.”

“Not him. Bill.”

Sharon considered her friend through the gloom. “Get you.”
Bill was lost. That put him one step further down the line than most of the people around him, who were merely losing. Some were losing their savings, their mortgages, their plans for the future; others were losing twenty dollars and calling it a night, although night and day had no purchase in this place, no meaning at all. Some were just losing their shirts, and, it had to be said, most of the shirts were worth losing. “The size of four football fields,” the brochure had said, and, indeed, the greensward of baize, table after table, stretched out to a horizon that you would never reach; was there one lonely guy, somewhere over there, peacefully playing craps against a wall? At least in football there were time restrictions, but here there was no end of play; no midfield, no defense, no more than the illusion of a win, just one damn loss after another. Everyone was having a fine time.

Just to add to the confusion, Bill had left his watch in the room. He was due to meet Petra and Sharon at seven thirty, for the start of the concert. They had checked in, left their bags in the room and headed straight out, Sharon having announced that she would be dining out on the next two days for the rest of her life and that, not unreasonably, she would not be wasting a second of them, certainly not on anything dull and wasteful as sleep. Bill, meanwhile, had collapsed on his bed and lain there, hands by his sides, eyes closed, as if in a well-appointed morgue.

Flying drained him, but it was more than that. He hadn’t quite understood his own reasons for coming on this trip; there was no need for him here, he didn’t have to write a piece, there was a decent writer already lined up. Now he knew the reasons. You drift along, he told himself, into the doldrums of your mid-forties, with a job you like but could never love; with a loud, distracting marriage behind you, a marriage that ran down like a radio; with an address book of old girlfriends whom you think about and very occasionally call, but who, you can be fairly sure, hardly ever think of you at all (listen to their voices when they hear yours, surprised without joy); with everything to live on and precious little to live for; with more of a life, in short, than millions have, and to claim otherwise would be ungrateful, and yet … It wasn’t the life, was it, for which you had hoped, and of which the old songs sang? And then, out of nowhere—

“I beg your pardon, sir. Coming by!” A waitress sailed past with a tray of drinks. Bill stopped her.

“I’m so sorry, do you by any chance have the time?”

“Are you British? You are so British.” She said this with good humor, no scorn in her tone at all, despite having identified him as a joke. And England was a joke, wasn’t it? Sport that went on for five days without a result, separate hot and cold taps, hotels without lions …

“It’s a quarter of eight,” she said, pointing out the large clock ten yards away, above a dealer’s head. She didn’t get why Bill hadn’t noticed it; was this British guy trying to pick her up? He looked kinda nice. Jeff Bridges before Jeff took to hiding that gorgeous face of his behind weirdo beards. Another time. He thanked her, she thanked him back and sailed on.

Christ, he was late. Where did the time go? You could buy most things in this town; maybe you could buy back time here, too, stake everything you had on retrieving that all-important twenty minutes … You could get married in twenty minutes here and regret it for twenty years. Or never regret it. He turned and ran—not too fast, he didn’t want to be collared and stopped for stealing chips. A security guard blocked his path.

“Sir? May I help you.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. The Cassidy concert, I’m late. I’m meeting my, my friends there. Is it far?”

“Okay, you want to go past KÀ.”

“Past a car?”

“KÀ, sir. Our world-famous effects extravaganza by Cirque du Soleil, exclusive to MGM Grand.”

“Fine, where is … car?” Bill found it hard to speak at moments like this.

“You want to make a left past those doors, then a hundred yards down, past KÀ, like I say, then follow the signs. Our automated walkway will assist you—”

“Thanks, bye,” said Bill, in one breath, and took off. He found the entrance to the concert, and was told to wait at the back until the next break in the songs. After the dazzle of the gaming floor and the permanent noon of the hotel corridors, it felt like midnight in here, and Bill was glad for the rest, not wanting to grope his way through the dark as if newly blind. David was onstage, under a couple of spotlights, with a band half hidden behind him. He was singing something that Bill hadn’t listened to, intentionally, for twenty-four years.
You don’t know how many times
I wished that I could hold you.
You don’t know how many times
I wished that I could mold you …
Not bad. The voice was in good shape. Taken the melody down at one or two, perhaps, so as not to risk a strain or a crack on the peak of “hold you, mold you.” Never the best rhyme in the world, that one: made girls sound like pots. Bill looked at David’s audience. How many men out there? A couple of dozen, among the hundreds of women? Who was it, which bunch of guys had landed on an island populated by women only? Something in the furthest nook of Bill’s memory turned up the word Argonauts. That was it: Jason and the boys, landing on Lemnos, outnumbered by the other sex but unable to hang around, having to move on. There was a golden fleece to find … How many guys had accompanied women to see David Cassidy down the years in the faint hope that some of that cherishing might come their way? Crumbs off the love god’s table. Crumbs would be okay, no shame in crumbs if you were famished.

Where was she? He couldn’t find Petra. Petra and Sharon, that is. Must be there somewhere. They wouldn’t have been late like him, not after waiting this long. At last he picked them out, half visible beside a row of five large ladies in matching green T-shirts. He sidled a yard down the aisle for a better angle, so that he could see Petra from the side. She was gazing at the stage with gleaming eyes, hands in her lap, swaying gently. He couldn’t see her feet, but he guessed they were tapping up and down. Sharon’s, too, most likely, but she was leaning farther forward, half out of her seat, hands clasped tightly together at her breast, like a young girl at her First Communion. She wore a smile of unmistakable rapture. As the song closed, the two of them, together with the rest of the crowd, took to their feet as if springs had gone off underneath them—hands over their heads, a blur of clapping right across the room. The singer took it well, his gratitude uncomplicated, nothing wistful about it; what did David’s expression look like, right now? It looked like Sharon’s.

With a glance at the usher, who nodded, Bill set off. He passed through the cheers, plowing a path down the aisle between waves of adoring women; none were looking at him, or were even aware of his passing, but yet, for a fraction of a second, he had a fraction of a sense of what it must be like—how it was, to be among the wants of the world. The only people who sneered at acclaim, he thought, were those who had had it and lost it, or grown too old and weary to enjoy it; or shy souls who shrank from the very thought of being known by more people than they knew. The ones you never heard from were the figures at the heart of the applause, the ones who could have told you, not in retrospect or hope, but face-to-face, with the fans going nuts: Look at me being loved. Be honest now; tell me you do not want this madness for yourself.

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

Up onstage, David was apologizing. He knew they wanted the songs from before, but, just once, he wanted to try something newer, you know, a little more up to date; a little number that explained how he was feeling now, at this wonderful juncture in his life, with all these great folks around him. The great folks shifted a little; you could feel them, brimming with goodwill (couldn’t blame the guy, could you, for wanting to break free of the past; give him a chance, right?), but also aware that any eagerness they could work up for this unknown song would be contrived—marks for effort, not freely given from the heart. And the man onstage took a breath, and sang softly into the mike:
How can I be sure …
And, of course, the place erupted. The old ones were the best, that was the point! The past is never dead! Not so long as they were alive. David, their David, was saying so, to them! Sharon was shaking, laughing, although if you had taken a photograph of her at that moment, and looked at it later, the next morning, you would have sworn that it showed a woman crying. She turned to Petra and Bill and shouted, “Oh, he’s a blimmin’ teeease, he is!”

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

I love you I love you forev-vah.…
Bill gestured toward the stage. “He doesn’t know the words.”

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

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

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

“What, ice creams?”

“Atomic bombs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What have you got planned?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Which bit?”

“The concert.”

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

“What?” Petra asked.

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

“Oh, stop it,” said Sharon, and pushed him off the bench.
“How’s the jet lag?” Petra said to Bill.

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

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

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

“That’s New York,” said Bill.

“Well, it’s all America, isn’t it?”

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

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

“Another world,” he said.

“Sorry?” Petra stood at his side.

“Just thinking. Sorry.”

“Can’t hear you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Speak for yourself,” said Petra.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Lots,” he replied.

“I meant here.”

“So did I.”

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

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

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

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

“But you’re a big cheese.”

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

“Like me and David.”

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

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

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

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

“Honestly?”

“Mm.”

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

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

“Be sure?”

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

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

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

“That’s what I thought.”

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

“What a swell story it is.”

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

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

“He’s not here?”

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

“The bargain-basement Welsh version.”

“Not at all. The spitting image.”

“And what would you have come as?”

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

“Not the Boss?”

“Not the Boss.”

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

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

“Shall I go and see?” Bill asked.

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

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

“Oh God.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I think so.”

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

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

“And you, sir. It was most pleasant.”

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

“Sorry, it sounds rubbish.”

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

Petra put a hand to her face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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