I Think I Love You

3

Of course, I dreamed about him all the time, but I didn’t tell the others that. You have to keep some things back for yourself. Just like I never told them the truth about my favorite song. When Gillian said “Could It Be Forever” was David’s best record, I said she was absolutely right. So fabulous. So romantic. The way that David kept you dangling and waited a whole stomach-flipping beat before slipping in that final “But.” And his voice just melted that word. I swear you can hear him smiling as he sings it. He must have known he had us exactly where he wanted us and he kept us waiting until we screamed and pleaded for him to say it … “But?”

We tended to chew these things over at lunchtime, which was spent huddled round the big old throbbing radiator in the science-lab corridor. When it was wet, anyway, which was most of the year where we lived. In spring, Gillian’s group moved its center of operations outside under the horse chestnuts at the far end of the playing fields. I was still new to the group, a recent substitute for Karen Jones, who had offended Gillian after Stuart Morris slow danced with her at the Christmas disco. I mean, danced with Karen, not Gillian. Fair play to Karen, Gillian never let on she fancied Stuart before she saw them dancing together, so Karen couldn’t have known, could she? Cried her eyes out when Gillian called her a slut in the carpark.

Compared to David, boys of our own age seemed like pathetic cretins.

“Look at him, he’s just a kid, he is,” Sharon would jeer if one of them dared to approach.

Experts in romance, we had never been kissed. We just knew David was a gentleman who would never try any of that stuff the boys did at the Starlight disco on Saturday nights. Grabbing a feel before they even got you a Pepsi. But Stuart Morris was three years older than we were and in the lower sixth. He was acting captain of the school first XV while Gareth Pugh’s knee was on the mend. Rugby was the local religion, so that made Stuart a god. Without needing to be told, almost as if we were born knowing it, we had grasped a key mathematical proof of the female universe: the more desirable a boy is, the less chance you have of getting him. The less chance you have of getting him, the more desirable he becomes. Therefore, boys who like and want you are not desirable. QED.

Anyway, Gillian was going with Stuart now and Karen was out and I was in, or almost. I was so desperate to keep in with them I needed to make the right impression without having a clue how.

“But isn’t a very sexy word,” I announced that lunchtime, trying to sound as though sexy was a word I used every day, although this was the first time I’d tried it out loud. “But in ‘Could It Be Forever,’ David makes but sound sexy.”

“David’s got a sexy butt!” shrieked Carol, overjoyed. “Sexy butt, sexy butt!”

Carol was the most advanced of all of us. She had meaty swimmer’s shoulders and a bum that stuck out so far you could balance a paper cup on it. Not only had she started her periods when she was ten, her breasts had developed overnight as though she’d gotten fed up with waiting and used a bike pump. I wouldn’t put it past her, to be honest with you. Carol was on really friendly terms with her breasts. She handled them like they were hamsters, even getting them out occasionally and petting them. Me, I would hardly dare glance at my own shy swellings in the bathroom mirror at home, not unless it was steamed up.

My nipples were flat and soft and dusky pink like rose petals. Carol’s were closer to walnuts; brown and nubbly, you could see them clearly through her blouse.

“Secondary sexual characteristics,” that’s what the Biology teacher called breasts. And with the blimmin’ boys right there in the same room with us. Thanks a lot, sir. They never let us forget it. SSCs. Secondary sexual characteristics.

Carol’s breasts were hard to ignore because she knotted her white blouse tight under them, even though she was always getting told off by the teachers for showing her stomach, which was the color of gravy browning all year round. Carol’s eyebrows were apricot, so fine they were practically invisible. When the sun shone, the skin underneath looked like bacon, so she drew the arches in with a brown Rimmel pencil. It made her look hard. Harder than she was really. And she had this way of wearing our school tie with a long dangly end so it seemed less like a boring tie and more like a lizard tongue for licking up boys. Carol was sexy, before we even knew what sexy was, is what I’m trying to say.

“Sexy butt! David’s got a sexy butt!” Sharon took up Carol’s chant, delighted by my mistake.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said quickly. “It’s just the way he pauses in the song and leaves you hanging on for the but …”

Too late. Even to my own ears I sounded stupidly earnest and pedantic. No-fun Petra. Learn to take a joke, why can’t you?

The others were all falling about. Even Angela and Olga, who had gone to fetch the drinks and the Kit Kats from the machine, and had missed the “sexy but” conversation. Carol’s honking piggy laugh moved into its final snorting stage and hot chocolate shot out of her nose and spattered all down her blouse so she looked like she’d been machine-gunned. My mum would’ve killed me, but Carol couldn’t have cared less. There was something animal about Carol that scared me sometimes.

“Petra wants a feel of David’s sexy butt,” she leered, puckering up her sink-plunger lips and grabbing at my skirt.

I pushed her away. “No, I don’t.”

God, don’t you hate blushing? Once a blush starts you can’t stop it; it goes everywhere, like a spilled glass of Ribena. Obviously, I had noticed David’s backside. You couldn’t very well not notice it, could you? It stuck out of all the photos of his concerts when he wore those slinky catsuits. But I didn’t want to hear David’s bum being joked about. Joking about ordinary boys was one thing, like having a laugh about Mark Tugwell, the double-bass player who sat behind me in county youth orchestra. Tuggy Tugwell. Carol said he kept a spare oboe down his pants, and I couldn’t stop myself looking whenever he uncrossed his legs. But this was different. I was in love. I loathed crude or disrespectful talk about David. I pictured myself riding to his defense in a long cream cheesecloth dress with a high collar, pin tucks on the bodice and frothy lace trim, like the one Karen Carpenter had. I’d be sitting on that palomino pony David is riding in my favorite poster on Sharon’s wall. But I’d be riding sidesaddle like the queen, so I didn’t spoil the dress.

Smutty jokes about David really upset me. I suppose they were an unwelcome reminder that he was common property. Stupid, really. I don’t know how you can get the idea that someone who has the biggest fan club in history, bigger than Elvis’s or the Beatles’, is yours and yours alone, but you can, you really can.

The hard thing was, I loved talking about David, and everything connected to him, even in a silly way. Wednesday nights, I would take the long way round to orchestra practice just so I could walk past David’s, the ironmongers, behind the bus station. Seeing his name written in big letters over the shop felt like a sign. I mean, it was a sign, you know, but a different kind of sign. Like the world knew that I loved him and put his name up there special. Just saying his name out loud was a thrill after hearing it a million times inside my own head. Talking about him to friends made him more real, but at the same time it meant I was sharing him, which hurt. I preferred it when we were alone together in my bedroom.

“David is sexy but what?” demanded Gillian, twitching her delicate, Beatrix Potter–bunny nose.

She was in her usual perch on top of the radiator, slender legs dangling down, sheer navy socks pulled up to her thighs, leaving only a few inches of pale flesh exposed. I tried not to look at the flash of white panties, which made me think of her new boyfriend and of what he might be doing to her. How I longed for those long socks of Gillian’s. My socks came to just below the knee and my mother insisted I wear garters to hold them up. The elastic burrowed into the skin, leaving an angry red bracelet round my calves. It took ages to fade. Sometimes, when I lay in the bath and looked at the marks on my legs, I liked to pretend I was a tortured saint. One who had courageously kept the faith and endured the red-hot irons of sadistic torturers with pointy beards, giving absolutely nothing away. Stigmata rhymed with garter.

“What’s so funny then about David singing ‘but’? I don’t get it,” Gillian demanded.

God had made Gillian perfect, but in His infinite wisdom He had left out a sense of humor. Maybe if you’re that pretty, He reckons you don’t need one. God probably thinks it’s worth giving a sense of humor only to those of us who have to laugh at all the rubbish bits that are wrong with us.

“It’s not funny,” I said, trying to silence Sharon with a pleading look.

She was supposed to be on my side, not Carol’s. When we were at her house doing our David scrapbooks, I felt we were getting really close, but at school I never quite knew whose friend she was. Sharon’s shifting loyalty stung more than Carol’s crude taunts.

“I was only saying ‘Could It Be Forever’ is David’s best song, like you said, Gillian,” I went on, hoping that saying Gillian’s name would make them stop. They were all scared of upsetting her, even Carol.

Gillian took a pot of Vaseline out of her bag and dabbed a blob on her bottom lip. She had this way of moving the jelly, flexing and rolling both lips to push it along and get even coverage without needing to use her finger. Like all of Gillian’s actions, it was seductive and mesmerizing. We all tried to copy her, but ended up with jelly on our teeth.

Gillian was looking at me as though I were something in a shopwindow she might seriously consider buying. For one brilliant moment I thought she was going to smile. Maybe even invite me round to her house to listen to records. Then she slid off the radiator, yanked down her skirt and said: “That’s the aggravating thing about you, Petra. You’re always agreeing, aren’t you?”

• • •

Our form room was out in one of the temporary classrooms next to the netball court. Better known as the Cowsheds. Freezing in winter, baking hot in summer. Walls so thin you could hear a chair being scraped back in the class next door. They called it the temporary block, but it had been there since the war.

On the way back to afternoon registration, Angela told us she had some news. I could tell from the little secret twitching smile on her face that she’d been saving it up like the last sweet in a packet. Her cousin, a girl called Joanna Crampton who lived in London, had phoned the night before. David was coming over to the United Kingdom to do two concerts at the end of May. It was for definite. Her cousin had read it in the Cassidy mag, which she got a week earlier than us because she lived in Hounslow. Everything took so long to reach South Wales. The whole world could have ended, London could be destroyed by a nuclear bomb and we’d still be stuck in Double Geography for all we knew about it.

The concert was on May 26 at a place called White City.

White. City. It sounded like a beautiful marble palace to me. Like the Taj Mahal maybe. I pictured the glittering paved road leading up to the turreted entrance and the sound of softly trickling fountains. The date was instantly imprinted on my brain like it was my wedding day: May 26.

“They’re saying it’s his last public performance ever,” announced Angela with a quiver of pride.

“He’s not coming again? Never! We gotta go then, Petra!” shrieked Sharon, slipping her arm through mine. “David’s gonna be looking for us, mun. We stopped biting our nails and everything. We got four hundred and thirty-nine photos of him and now he’s saying it’s his last concert. There’s gratitude for you!”

It felt so nice to hear our laughs twining round each other, her hiccupy soprano, my scratchy alto. I knew Sharon was sorry about Carol and the sexy but.

“If we want tickets,” Angela said, “we’ve got to get a move on and send a postal order. One pound each, it is.”

“I got one of them from my auntie for half a crown,” Sharon said.

“What’s a pound in the old money then?” someone asked.

Olga did the calculation while the rest of us were still counting on our fingers. She had a fantastic head for figures, did Olga.

Before we went decimal, it used to be twelve pennies to the shilling. Three years later and I was still scared of the decimal point. Put it in the wrong place and you could be out by hundreds. My thirteen-year-old brain clung stubbornly to pounds, shillings and pence. I particularly mourned the passing of the threepenny bit, which felt heavy and hot in your hand and had a really satisfying bumpy edge. It was definitely the best coin to play with in your pocket if you were nervous.

“Ach, typical British. Only they would really be counting in twelves in the first place,” my mother said. Evidence of the backwardness of her adopted homeland was one of her favorite things.

Gillian announced that she had twenty-five pounds in post office savings. A small fortune, it made us gasp. Carol said she could nick a load off her dad, who ran the amusement arcade down by the pier and always had a big bag of change.

“So we’ve got a tidy bit already. Problem is, we have to think about the train fare now and the Underground the other end,” Olga said, appointing herself treasurer of the trip, though she didn’t have many rivals for the post.

As the girls added up the money they had, plus the money they thought they could get, I felt panic rising within me, a salty tide that reached the back of my mouth and made me feel my lunch was about to come up. This couldn’t be happening. I’d always felt there’d be plenty of time to see him. Every cell in my body was getting ready for that meeting. He’d wait for as long as it took, I knew. Until the spots across my oily T-zone were gone. Until my breasts were worthy of a proper bra. (Playtex trusted intimate apparel for the Woman You Want to Be. Pink, underwired. Page 78 of the Freemans catalog.) Until I had gotten the Bach cello suites exactly how they were supposed to sound. Pain and joy braided tightly together, like my mother plaiting my hair until my scalp squealed for mercy. Pain and joy, pain and joy. One day, I planned to play my favorite pieces for David. Even if words failed me, music never would.

But now there were no more untils. David’s final concert in Britain was less than a month away. After that, he was never coming back. I’d be like that girl in the play we were doing in English. She never told her love but let concealment like a worm in the bud feed on her cheek. That’s exactly what it felt like. Something gnawing away at your insides. I knew more about David than anybody. All of my preparations could not go to waste.

Somehow, I would get a ticket and go to him at the White City.
There were things my mother didn’t know. My mother didn’t know that she had chosen a really bad name for me, because Petra was also the name of a famous dog on children’s TV. She didn’t know that whenever our teacher called the register and got to me, the whole class started barking, or at least most of the boys did.

My name came next but one to last, so I always had a couple of minutes in which I pretended I was too busy to care about what was coming up. Fitting a new cartridge in my pen, carefully wrapping the old one in blotting paper, searching my satchel under the desk for a sharpener I knew perfectly well was in my brown furry pencil case.

First Mr. Griffiths had to get through the Davieses, including poor Susan Smell, all the Joneses, one Lewis (my Sharon), one Morgan, mad Gareth Roberts, then all the Thomases—

“Karen Thomas?”

“ ’Ere, sir.”

“Karl Thomas?”

“By’ere, sir.”

“Siân Thomas? Susan Thomas?”

There were six Thomases altogether, including two cousins who looked like speckled brown eggs. Their dads were identical twins who took turns working the ham machine down at the Coop wearing nets over their sandy hair so the dandruff didn’t fall in the meat. After the last Thomas, there was a pause that always felt like an eternity in hell to me before …

“Petra Willi—?”

“Woof! Woof! Awooooo.”

“Petra Williams. Quiet! I said, QUIET!”

The class became a kennel. Yapping, snarling, barking. In the back row, Jimmy Lo threw his head back and howled like a wolf under a full moon.

My new friends in Gillian’s group shot me quick, encouraging smiles. The smiles said they were really sorry and embarrassed for me. Mostly, though, I think they were just glad it wasn’t them who had the name of the TV dog.

“All right, that’s enough, class,” Mr. Griffiths snapped.

If the barking carried on when he tried to read out Steven Williams’s name, which came straight after mine, Mr. Griffiths began to change color. You could watch the blood travel upward from his shirt collar and suffuse his face as though red ink were being injected into his neck.

“I said, that’s enough of that. Let’s be having you. I said silence NOW, class.”

Mr. Griffiths was a nice man, but he was young for a teacher, and good-looking, with sideburns, pleading spaniel eyes and a floppy mustache, and I just knew it would be better if he was older and ugly so that his anger was scary instead of funny.

The barking wasn’t really my mum’s fault. My mother didn’t know that Petra was the name of the dog on Blue Peter, because we didn’t have a TV set. My mother didn’t agree with television.

“It is a box for idiots,” she said.

In fact, my mother claimed that scientists had proved that if you stared at a television set for long enough, rays from the inside could destroy your vital organs, even the kidneys, which are located at the back of your body beneath your waist. When I first told Sharon about the danger television rays posed to internal organs, we were in her lounge, sitting on the Lewises’ new mustard Dralon three-piece suite and waiting for The Partridge Family to start. We had our favorite clothes on. Well, we had to dress up for David, didn’t we? Barred by Mrs. Lewis from watching the show because of their disrespectful comments, Sharon’s big brother, Michael, and his friend Rob were outside the door, keeping up a sniggering commentary and threatening terrible violence against David.

“Hello, poofter, hear the song that we’re singing, / C’mon, he’s crappy,” the boys sang tunelessly to the Partridge theme tune.

“Shut yer face, yer only jealous,” Sharon bellowed back.

She laughed about the rays from the TV, but a few seconds later she went into the kitchen and came back holding two baking trays high in the air like they were cymbals. We both lay back on the settee with the trays covering our chests and stomachs.

“The trays will deflect the poisonous rays,” Sharon said in a metallic Captain Scarlet voice. “Don’t panic now, will you? Your kidneys are safe with me, Petra fach.”

The baking trays made us look like Roman soldiers who had died in battle.
In the lunch queue outside the hall, Jimmy Lo, whose parents ran the Chinese takeaway on Gwynber Street, shouted: “Petra is a German shepherd.” He pronounced German as “Jermin.” “Geddit? Jermin shepherd. Petra. Woof woof!” And then the boys with him—Mark “Tuggy” Tugwell and Andrew “Amor” Morris—started to sing:
Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler has something sim’lar …
(Years later, after I had gone to college in London, Lo’s Chinese restaurant was closed down by health inspectors for serving Alsatian meat in the chop suey. This is known as poetic justice.)

The Germans bombed our town during the war and people don’t forget something like that in a hurry. They had a display on the bombing in the central library, in the main corridor with old photographs the color of tea. Night after night, the planes came back to hit the steelworks and the docks. The explosions lit up the sea like a giant flash photograph, and you could see as far away as Ireland, people said. If the pilots couldn’t find their target, they just unloaded the bombs anyway so the planes would have enough fuel to make the journey home to Germany. I knew all about it because Mamgu and Tad-cu, my grandparents, had a farm up in the hills behind the town, and they were shutting up the cows one night when they heard an incredible piercing sound.

“Well, ye Dew, Dew, you’d have thought the Almighty Himself was wolf whistling,” Mam always said when she told her grandchildren the bomb story. We knew it was true because the crater was still in the top field. It was so big you could fit a whole house in there.

I found it hard to believe that my mother was on the other side during the war, because our side was right and we won. In our house, it was my mother who was right and she always won.

When my grandparents, my dad and his two sisters, Auntie Edna and Auntie Mair, were running toward the byre in their nightclothes with buckets of water, the plane that caused the fire was already on its way back to the country where my six-year-old mother was sleeping. A pregnant cow lost her calf and, for five days after the bomb, the entire herd’s milk came out as cheese.

See, even before my parents met, they were already fighting.
In my favorite David dream, the register was being called when David opened the door and strolled into our classroom. It was always after the six Thomases and just as Mr. Griffiths said my name. David was wearing that white open-necked knitted shirt with the outsized collar and pearly buttons he wore on the album cover of Cherish.

My God, has he ever looked more beautiful? David Cassidy was the only human, male or female, who could make a feather cut seem insanely desirable. Looking out of that album cover, his gaze is so intense his hazel eyes are practically black; like the Mona Lisa, his eyes make you want to look and look and never stop looking.

Once he was in our classroom, David would introduce himself to Mr. Griffiths, smile his gorgeous, easy Keith Partridge smile and say, “Hey, Petra. What a cool name! I really dig it.”

That would shut them up. They would be so impressed that a world superstar had turned up at our school. And David, being American, wouldn’t know Petra was a TV dog. He’d think Petra was just a name like any other, maybe even a pretty name. When I was older I would live in America in a canyon and no one would bark at me ever again.

My friends never spoke about the barking. It was probably hard to think of what to say. Only two people mentioned it. One was Susan Davies.

I was coming out of a stall in the toilets this break time, right, and Susan was over by the paper towels; she’d folded one of the towels in this really clever way to look like a dove and she stood there working the wings so they opened and closed. We were alone.

“Mustn’t let them get you down with that barking, must you?” Susan said, almost to herself.

“No,” I said, turning on the tap and pumping the button on the soap dispenser. You always tried to get a drop even though the hard pink bubblegum gunk over the spout stopped any coming out. Susan’s unmistakable odor—the smell-shock of her that forced you to breathe through your mouth when she was near—merged into the sweet stink of the toilets.

“There’s lovely your hair’s looking with you, Petra,” she said.

I glanced up and saw her face in the mirror. If you forced yourself to withhold judgment for a few seconds, it was possible to see that a girl with thickly lashed brown eyes and sweetheart-bow lips was under that disastrous pockmarked mask. Susan’s own hair was fair and shiny like in an advert and so long she could sit on it. The hair was her only claim to beauty and I knew in that moment, when she praised mine, how well she took care of it, how it was lovingly conditioned and brushed every night so it would be perfect for school in the morning. If you saw Susan Davies from behind and you didn’t know, you’d be waiting for a real looker to turn round. I wondered what that would be like, to turn to acknowledge a wolf whistle with a Silvikrin swish of your long flaxen hair and to see the shock and disgust in a boy’s eyes.

“Your hair’s—” I began, but the door to the toilets slammed open like a cowboy was coming into a saloon for a gunfight. Carol. She ignored Susan, pulled her pants down, plunked herself on a toilet and didn’t even bother to lock the door as the pee sluiced into the pan and she let off a squealy, pressure-relieving fart.

“They’re dead stingy in that cafeteria,” Carol said, addressing the toilets as if it was just the two of us. When I turned round, the only evidence Susan had been there was a paper dove perched on the top of the bin. I pushed it down under the other towels. I didn’t like it, Susan acting like we were both in the same boat. I didn’t want her pity. What did it make me if I was being pitied by Susan Smell?

“You bin talking to Susan Davies, then?” Carol said.

“Gerraway with you,” I said, holding my nose and pretending to faint at the imaginary stink.

Carol honked her approval.

Unpopularity was like a germ you could catch. It was better not to get too close.
The only other person who mentioned the barking was Steven Williams. It was that same afternoon we decided to get tickets for David’s concert, and everyone was charging in a mad bundle out of the class after registration when Steven came up and handed me a copy of Twelfth Night.

“Hi-ya? Think this is yours,” he said.

Steven was tall and he stooped slightly when he spoke to me. I knew he was one of the rugby boys and a mate of the evil barking Jimmy Lo. He had a scratch on his cheek beneath his right eye, which was the same blue as warm summer sea. The width of his shoulders was amazing close up. I felt like a Barbie doll next to him.

It wasn’t my copy of the play, I knew that. Mine was in my bag. I’d seen it when I was hiding my red face in there during registration.

“Thanks,” I said, and took it.

“Sorry, like, about the barking,” Steven Williams said. “Boys’re a bit mental, that’s all.”

I nodded.

“Rose-red city, is it?”

“What?”

“Petra. Rose-red city, half as old as time.” He spoke the words clearly as if he were an actor reciting a poem.

“Dunno,” I said.

Why? Please God, why? I’d never said “dunno” in my life before. Dunno was common. Dunno was the vocabulary of morons. My mother could drop down dead in the street if she knew she had a daughter who said “dunno.” The woman who devoured Reader’s Digest’s “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” could not have produced a child who said “dunno.”

“Remember your manners, Petra, for Gott’s sake,” my mother would chide.

“Thanks a lot,” I tried again and nervously cracked a smile.

Steven picked up his red-striped Adidas sports bag and slung it over his shoulder as if ready to go, but then he stayed where he was, moving his weight from one foot to the other.

Was it a trap? I looked around to check if Jimmy and the other boys were lying in wait, but they were already a hundred yards down the path, booting their bags into the mud and falling on top of them.

“Thought you’d like to know—about the other Petra, like.”

“Thanks. I didn’t. Know. Rose-red city.” Which was the color of my cheeks by then, of course. The blush traveled faster than the feeling that was driving it; a feeling for which I did not yet have a name. One of the most powerful feelings in the whole wide world.

“So long, then,” Steven said, gesturing with his free arm to show me he needed to catch up with the other boys. He raised his eyes from the floor and smiled. The smile said the barking wasn’t going to stop, but that he didn’t agree with it.

“So long, then.”

I think we’d just had our first conversation.
“What did Steven Williams want with you, then?” Gillian demanded when I caught up with the girls in Needlework.

She put the emphasis on the you. As though I were the last girl in the world any boy would want to talk to.

“He had a book of mine by mistake,” I said.

I hated Needlework—or, rather, Needlework hated me. I’d been trying to put a zip in a midi-skirt for three lessons and Miss kept telling me to unpick it and try again. Each time I gently depressed the foot pedal on the little sewing machine I felt like a rodeo rider forced to ride a giant bee. Just the faintest touch on the pedal and the needle went crazy. Bbbzbzzbbzzzzz.

“Steven Williams can get between my covers any day,” Carol smirked, raising herself half out of the chair and making thrusting motions with her hips. Olga rolled her eyes at me. Unlike me, Olga actually wore her glasses in school and could see.

“Good-looking boy, fair play to him, keeps himself tidy,” Sharon said, licking the end of a piece of cotton before threading it through a needle. She began to maneuver a sleeve into place in the bodice of a pink satin bridesmaid dress that she would wear at her auntie’s wedding in August. It already had darts on the bust, an assortment of pin-tucks and an invisibly stitched hem. The long puffed sleeves, lying like amputated limbs on the table ready to be sewn in, had perfect crimped-pastry tops. What I am telling you is that Sharon’s dress looked like a dress. A feat more astonishing to me than writing a symphony or docking a spaceship. That dress was so professional Sharon could have sold it in a shop.

“Anyway, that Steven Williams is a terrible kisser. Bethan Clark ’ad him,” confided Gillian. “Spits in your mouth, he does.”
We were walking down the street, arm in arm, our group. Gillian was in the middle and that Saturday she allowed Sharon and Angela to link arms with her. The second favorites got to hold the arms of the girls holding onto Gillian. I was on the outside, but oddly exhilarated and grateful to be part of the lineup at all. Because the pavement was narrow, I had to let go of Olga’s arm every time we came to a lamppost, step into the gutter, then quickly hop back onto the pavement and grab her again. The conversation moved on, so I was always a beat or two behind. In my hurry, I failed to notice the dog mess.

“Ach-a-fi, Petra, is that you? Got something on your shoe? For God’s sake, girl.”

Gillian said I could catch them up once I’d gotten the poo off my shoe.

“Come up my house after, okay?” yelled Angela without looking round. My friends moved off, not breaking formation, their backs like a wall.

I found a lolly stick in the hedge and started to flick out the claggy orange shit from the sole. It took ages because the smell kept making me gag; the last bits were stuck deep in the rubber criss-cross pattern, and I tried to rub them off with a dock leaf. God, my hands really stank and I didn’t have any tissues. It was okay, though, because I could wash them at Angela’s house in her downstairs cloakroom. I ran my fastest up the hill to catch them up and I got a stitch; the pain ripped into my left side and I had to sit on a wall for a while till it died down: then I picked the wrong turning, didn’t I, and I had to go back to the main road again to get my bearings. I was so late. The pungent, gritty smell of melting chip fat started to come from the houses where the women were putting dinner on. The girls’d be worrying and thinking I’d gone home or something. Eventually, I found the horseshoe-shaped close of detached houses where English Angela lived. It was lovely, really new with all these young trees planted in circles of soil cut in the front lawns. The trees were just sticks tied to a post really, with a single branch of pale pink blossom like the kind of feather boa I always wanted. Angela’s place had a patio and a cloakroom and everything. Lucky I remembered the number. I was so relieved and happy that I knew which house was Angela’s I almost started crying when her mum opened the door.

The woman was carrying a baby girl who had damp ringlets stuck to her head and looked grumpy, like she’d just woken from a nap. Angela’s mum seemed surprised when I said why I was there.

“Oh, sorry, love, the girls aren’t here. They’re over Gillian’s tonight. Bit of a party. Forget, did you?”
I did forget something. I forgot to tell you my favorite David song. It wasn’t “Could It Be Forever,” not even with that gorgeous, sexy dangling but. It was “I Am a Clown.”

The single made it only to number three on the U.K. charts, but it was always my personal number one tearjerker. I loved it because it was so sad, so soulful, so sensitive and deep all at the same time. Probably what I thought I was. David sang about being a clown in a circus sideshow. He had to keep smiling no matter what, even though it was killing him on the inside. The first time I heard “I Am a Clown” I got the shivers. Honest to God, I felt that he was speaking to me in code. David felt lonely and trapped in his pop-star life and only I could hear him. And you’d never have guessed it, but being able to feel a bit sorry for him was even better than thinking he was perfect. It was like noticing he had bad skin and not minding. (Which he did, as it happened, and I didn’t mind because David’s spots came up when he suffered with his nerves and all that makeup he had to wear for filming. It wasn’t acne or anything. He was just sensitive, that’s all.)

If David could be pitied, it meant that he needed me. I had a role to play in his life. Despite all of his wealth and fame and all the millions of girls he could choose from, he needed me.

David Cassidy was lonely. The thought was strangely thrilling. With me he would not be lonely anymore.

That’s why I never revealed my favorite song to the other girls. If I told them, then they could copy my idea. It might cost me some crucial advantage when David and I finally met. He was going to be so impressed I hadn’t chosen one of his obvious hits, wasn’t he?

“Gee, that’s amazing, Petra. You dig ‘I Am a Clown’? Wow. No one else ever noticed that song and it means so much to me. It happens to be my personal favorite.”

And what would I say back to him?

Believe me. You really don’t have to worry. I only want to make you happy. And if you say, Hey, go away, I will. But I think, better still, I’d better stay around and love you. Do you think I have a case? Let me ask you to your face.

Do you think you love me?

I THINK I LOVE YOU.