I Think I Love You

4

Twenty to six, and Bill was staring at his second pint. They had only arrived at the pub, he and Pete, seven minutes ago, but already he had ordered and consumed a large, smeared glass of the usual. He didn’t know what the usual was; his own usual was whisky when he could afford it, or Guinness when he could not, or even, on a spring evening, with sunglasses on and no male acquaintances within ten miles, a gin and tonic. But now, in the Cat & Fiddle, not wanting to appear different, or to be mistaken for posh, he had listened to what Pete had asked for and carefully followed his lead. And the usual, it turned out, was most unusual: a pale, brackish draught of what appeared to be canal water, topped with a drift of industrial scum. He had forced it down, then more of the same to take away the taste. Each man was paying for his own; Pete had not paid for Bill’s, and Bill, slipping easily into the habit of meanness, had returned the lack of favor. He had, however, bought a packet of crisps, which sat between them, and into which Pete was now freely plunging his fist. He seemed worked up about something.

“I mean, it’s bollocks. Just complete and utter bollocks.”

He paused for effect. Bill, whose mind had been elsewhere, wondered if he was meant to lend support. “Well, it’s certainly—” he began.

“Right. Total. And the worst thing is, they don’t even know they’re doing it.” His fingers rustled among the crisps. “D’you think it’s a girl thing?”

“Well, it might—”

“Has to be. I mean, the way they take one tiny detail and go completely mental over it. Like it’s life or bleedin’ death. You wouldn’t get a bloke doing that, would you?” Pete pulled his fingers out and licked off the salt. He had been to the Gents when they first entered the pub—too quick a visit, Bill reckoned, to have spent time washing his hands.

“Oh, no, no,” said Bill, who had resolved to agree with everything his new colleagues said. As a strategy for fitting in it was imperfect, but it would do until he came up with a better one. They paused to drink in unison. Pete offered Bill one of Bill’s own crisps, which he declined. There were hardly any left.

“You’re right,” Pete continued, as if he and Bill were in the midst of a constructive discussion. “It is just girls. They get the record home and play it like a million times, and then their dad comes in to tell them to turn it down, and when he slams the bedroom door the needle jumps, so that there’s this bloody great scratch across, I dunno, ‘Can It Be Forever’ or whatever—”

“ ‘Could It.’ ”

“Could it what?”

“ ‘Could It Be Forever.’ That’s the name of the song, actually.” Bill was on safe ground. For a fraction of a second, he was appalled to discover in himself a sliver of pride: the righteous pride of a man who knows his special subject and is not afraid to correct anyone who doesn’t. In great haste he drained his glass, almost to the lees.

“Sod off,” said Pete, without rancor, or not much. “Anyways, for about a fortnight they go totally spare, like somebody died, and they hate their parents and won’t eat. And then, this is the mad bit, they sit around with their girlfriends, who are just like them but worse, and they egg each other on, so they get their rockers in a twist—”

“Knickers.”

“Pardon?”

“Knickers,” said Bill. “You get your knickers in a twist, you go off your rocker. They’re different things.” As he spoke, he could hear his voice growing smaller and starting to die. Pete must have heard it, too, because he leaned a bit closer and said: “It’s true, then.”

“What’s true?” Bill smiled, trying to keep things light. He helped himself to a crisp.

“What they said, that you’re one of them college wankers.”

“Who said?” Bill asked in genuine curiosity, but Pete just sniffed. The crisp tasted damp. There was salt on his gums. Not for the first time he felt the full horror of being English: sitting in a packed pub, drinking swill, with someone you don’t care about, being quizzed about your social class. He asked himself—again, not for the first time—what it was like for David, living in California. Even if it was only a tenth as good as the songs made out, only a hundredth as sunny and relaxed as it looked in the films, it had to be better than this.

He reached for his pint, downed the dregs and used them to rinse his mouth. As he did so, he shook his head, as if trying to rid himself of a thought, like a cow with flies on its eyes. Here I am, he reflected, a graduate, an adult, more or less, and I am jealous of David Cassidy. In his first three months of employment at Worldwind Publishing, Bill had devoted most of his waking hours to studying the life and style of David Bruce Cassidy—or, as Bill had described him to Pete, “that lucky sonofabitch.” The curse sounded false coming out of Bill’s mouth, he knew that. He had to take a run up at it, like a horse attempting a four-bar gate.

Sun-nuv-vuh-bitch.

You really needed the proper twang, like someone out of Dirty Harry or The Dirty Dozen—a dirty movie, anyway—to get the full effect, and Bill’s version of a twang was worse than useless. He had never been able to do accents, and his American was especially pathetic; he sounded, and indeed looked, like a man trying to dislodge a shred of meat from a back tooth with his tongue. But, for all that, and despite the fear of making a fool of himself, he loved sonofabitch. He loved it because, for a second, even if it didn’t make him come across as American, it made him feel American. And that was obviously better than being a twat from Tolworth, two stops down from Wimbledon.

“Sorry, go on about the record,” he said, trying to restart. He could see Pete struggling between the urge to tell his story and the well-worn need to pick a fight. Eventually, he sighed, brushed the empty crisp packet onto the floor and carried on. The fight could wait.

“Like I said, there’s this scratch, and they decide that’s an omen. Like it means something. Didn’t people used to look at guts to tell the future, Greeks and that?”

“Absolutely,” said Bill, who let his neck slacken so his heavy head nodded and nodded like one of those toy dogs in the back window of a car. Who on earth had the strength for a fight on a Friday evening, with your spirit sapped by a week of slog at the premier David Cassidy fanzine? Pete could have denied the moon landings, at this moment, or the Holocaust, and Bill would have nodded along.

“So, they decide that the scratch, which was only caused by her dad, is a message from Cassidy.” Pete would have broken his beer glass and chewed the shards rather than call a pop star, any pop star, by his Christian name. They weren’t friends, him and Cassidy. He didn’t know the bastard. Didn’t have him round for tea. And it wasn’t just pop stars, nancies like that. It was any fella. Surnames, all the way. To Pete, the tragedy of James Bond had come the previous year, when Connery had given way to Moore. The Aussie bloke didn’t count.

“And because the scratch is on that song, the ‘Forever’ one,” he went on, “it means that Cassidy is striking it out, or some crap like that, or changing his mind. Instead of Can It Be”—he glanced at Bill, daring him to a challenge—“it means, sod the question, It Will Be. You Will Be Mine. You, you girls, sitting there with your purple hot pants and your stupid gonks.” For Pete, this was rhetoric enough, and he made a swiping motion, one hand across his face, as if to brush away the blame. “I read it,” he explained. “In that bloody rag we put together.”

“And in Amsterdam,” Bill said, firing back, “he wore this stupid red stuff along the edges of his suit.” He thought it was a good idea to borrow some of Pete’s outrage, even though he couldn’t feel it himself. What Pete took as an insult—to England, to his manhood, to his certain knowledge of women—Bill treated as mildly intriguing. But he couldn’t admit as much, so he pretended to be picking up the thread. “He had on this white catsuit”—Pete reacted to the word with a vigorous air show of mock masturbation, the other hand gripping his glass—“and it was trimmed in scarlet. And I promise you, we had more letters about that—what’s it called? Frogging?”

Finally, they both had something to laugh at. Bill was warming to his theme, surprising himself in the process, and he went on.

“And these letters told us what the red meant. One girl had taken the photo we had and traced it, on greaseproof paper, and she sent us the tracing to prove that he was actually trying to spell out her signature in red braid.”

“Christ.” Pete was bent low, for some reason, as if grieving at all this female folly. His nose was almost touching the beer mats.

“And another thought that the frogging, the stuff on Cassidy’s suit, was a dragon.”

“What?”

“She thought the pattern looked like a dragon’s head.”

“What?”

“And that was meant to signify the Welsh dragon.”

“What?”

“And she was from Pontypool, so she thought Cassidy’s catsuit design was aimed at her.” Bill waited for Pete to reply, like someone hitting back a tennis ball, but even Pete was flattened into silence. Swiftly he finished his drink, slipped from the bar stool and made for the door. Bill shrugged and followed him. They stood outside the pub, on a slender one-way street, where the air was no more breathable than within. Traffic fumes spilled from the road and met the yeasty waft of beer. Bill could barely move.

“ ’Lo, mates.”

A bent figure was suddenly by their side, grinning up at them. It was Chas, the ageless office boy, scampering and talking through his teeth. He looked like an old English elf from the cover of a prog-rock album.

“Bin in the pisser?”

That was the office nickname for the pub, derived from rhyming slang. Bill had been stumped for a while, and Pete had had to spell it out for him, wearily, as if explaining a sum to a child. “Cat & Fiddle, piddle, pisser. Jesus, I thought you were s’posed to be the clever clogs.”

Chas was angling now, in the brewing dusk. “Drowned ’em?”

“Yeah, we’re done,” said Pete. He was even less keen on buying a drink for Chas than he had been for Bill. He would not have bought him a drink after a month in the desert.

“Hello, Chas,” said Bill, looking down at him.

“Heard the big news?”

“No, what?” Bill had a weakness for the catastrophic event. “Plane crash? Queen been shot? Peter Purves gets off with Val?”

“Hnyah, no such luck,” said Chas, giving a short snort. “Just in. Schedule for the tour. Seems like our Mr. Cassidy will be performing his miracles all over the shop. White City. Twenty-sixth of May.”

“So?” This was Pete, with all the sourness he could muster.

“So we have to tempt the little misses even more, that’s what.”

“Whatcha mean, even more? They don’t need tempting, they need a bloody fire hose to keep them off,” said Pete. “Me and Bill here were just talking about it. You could ask them for anything, I mean anything, and they would lie down and let you have it, just for one more look at their lovely …”—he stopped, wound himself up, until his whole body was a sneer—“Daaaaayvid.”

“But this isn’t just a look,” said Chas. “This is London.”

“White City?” echoed Pete. “What’s he doing in that dump?”

“How many can you get into White City?” asked Bill. “Twenty thousand?”

“God no, thirty, easily,” said Chas.

“Thirty-five, with those little girlies,” said Pete. “Pack ’em in nice and tight. Squeeze the little darlings till they snap. Love that, they will.”

“And we get hold of some tickets and give them away as prizes? Is that the idea?”

“That’s it.”

The three men stood on the curb, jostled by drinkers and passersby.

“Can you imagine?” asked Bill at last.

“Not much, hnyah,” said Chas.

“I mean, imagine being one of those girls. The ones who win our tickets.”

The other two peered at him, not quite sure if they liked his drift, let alone his imagination.

“Come again?” Chas was wrinkling his nose and rubbing the tip. He was getting thirsty, almost to the point of using his own cash.

“Well, they sit all day in, in, Hartlepool, or Worthing, or, or—”

“Fife. We’ve had some loonies from Fife.”

“And then one day, they get chosen to go and see the guy in person. I mean, these girls feel chosen anyway. They feel he’s waiting for them.” Bill looked at his colleagues. “Believe me, I know, I read their bloody letters. That’s my job, okay? And now they will be chosen. Some girl will already be able to tell you Cassidy’s favorite color and the color of his eyes, and whether he likes cornflakes or Rice Krispies, whether he has freckles—”

“He doesn’t.” Pete sounded firmer than normal, like a defendant denying the charges in court. “No freckles. He has spots. Scores of the buggers. Believe me, Bill, I know, I scrub them out. That’s my job.” He glanced down at Chas, who snickered on cue.

“Touché,” said Bill.

“To what?”

“Doesn’t matter. Point is, if I already knew the poor bloke’s star sign, and I could read my future in his stars and all that palaver, I would open my envelope from the magazine, as licked and sealed by Chas”—whose tongue stuck out at this, again on cue—“and I would just, you know, faint. Or die.”

For a moment, neither of the others spoke. Then Pete inquired: “What is it, anyway?”

“What’s what?”

“His star sign?”

“Aries, but that’s not the point. What I’m trying—”

But he had gone too far, and the others leaped.

“Ayr-ries? You are a wanker! I knew it,” said Pete.

So great was Chas’s glee that he actually bunched his bony little fists and beat them together, like a wind-up monkey playing the cymbals. They had a fellow worker who knew the horoscope of a male pop star: you could sit next to someone for five years and not find anything as juicy as that. They might as well have discovered Bill sleeping with a teddy bear, or combing a doll’s hair.

Bill let their pleasure rise and subside. Nothing he could do about it; they would stash his confession away and use it in the future, whenever he needed embarrassing. Could be anytime.

He had only himself to blame. That morning, Bill had completed a feature about David’s star sign under the headline MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE GROOVIEST ARIAN OF THEM ALL? Bill despised astrology, although, to be fair, it was hard to hate something that didn’t exist. It was like reading a travel article about the best hotels in Atlantis. But girls liked it, he had noticed, even sensible ones; even clever ones, girls with degrees in philosophy or history who could pull apart the basis of the Christian faith over a prawn curry but would still take their pen, on the bus ride home, and draw a careful red circle around the prediction that, come Tuesday, Sagittarians would feel an upswing in their private life that could be risky but that, handled wisely, might produce a major change. Ruth, for example, was on the cusp between Cancer and Leo, so she read the forecast for each sign and picked the one she liked best. Bill was astounded that the future of their relationship might hang on whether his girlfriend woke up feeling more like a lion than a crab.

No constellations wheeled above the street. No stars, however bright, could beam their messages of encouragement and caution through the soup of London air. Bill shook himself.

“All right, you two,” he said. “I’m done. See you on—”

But he never named the day. He had paused, on the brink, to stare past Pete and over Chas’s head; his shame forgotten, his focus locked elsewhere. Down the street came something that was not meant to come down streets; certainly not small streets off Tottenham Court Road, with a low breeze blowing used sports pages onto the roadway and wads of Juicy Fruit stuck to the curb. It was vast and flat, and as it prowled along it growled at the drinkers on either side, who instinctively leaned back to let it pass, raising their drinks to shoulder level. To Bill, it was as if he were six years old, on horseback, beside a castle moat, with a dragon coming over the drawbridge, breathing flame.

“Jesus,” he said. “An Espada.”

Chas, who was unimpressed by the vision, and, more important, could see no good reason anyone else should be impressed, picked up the sound.

“Ay vee-va, Espadya,” he sang, to no one in particular.

“That’s not a car,” said Pete. “That’s an aircraft carrier.” His breath came out in a rush as he spoke, and Bill realized that he must have been holding it.

“It’s an S2,” said Bill.

“Could even be an S3. Try and check the steering wheel as it goes by. They updated it last year.” Pete and Bill had been seeking common ground for some weeks now, something that would lead them beyond the habit of rubbishing office life, and Bill, for one, who feared friendlessness more than most things, had almost despaired of establishing any point of contact. Now they had found one.

“What’s all this S bollocks?” asked Chas.

“Well, the engine’s pretty much the same, but they’ve changed it a couple of times since ’68, and you can really tell only from the interior,” Bill said.

“Who’s they?”

“Lamborghini.” Bill was genuinely astonished. He thought that such a passion was obvious, infectious and shared by every man. “Don’t you recognize it?”

“Bog off.”

There was a stifled laugh from beside him. Two women, holding gin and tonics, were listening. When Bill looked at them they glanced away.

“Christ, look at it,” said Pete. “It’s so low.”

The car was almost alongside now, moving warily, between the drinkers on either side of the street. They almost stood to attention, as if making way for a hearse. The roof barely reached Bill’s chest, and he had to duck down to look inside. He couldn’t make out the steering wheel, but he did catch a flash of sideburns, and a roll-neck sweater that matched the cream interior. Chas, bent almost double, had seen it too, and for him that decided it. He straightened up, with a curling lip, and said out loud, “Tosser.” Bill knew he was right, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off the car. As it cleared the mob, it quickened, the growl becoming a low roar, then turned and was lost from sight.

“Never seen one before.” Pete stood staring down the empty street.

“Me neither,” Bill said.

“So how d’you know about the inside and all that bollocks?” Chas asked. He seemed perplexed.

“Read it in Autocar. They had a Lambo special couple of months ago,” said Pete.

“God, yeah, did you see that bit where they took a Miura P400SV and put it against the Daytona?”

“Fantastic. Just brilliant. But I hate the way they took the eyelashes off the SV. I mean, I know it’s got better carbs and everything, but the lashes were the best bit. Give me the S any day.”

“I know.” Bill had more to say on the subject, but even as he spoke he was conscious of having crossed a line. Pete couldn’t care less—as far as he was concerned, he had witnessed a miracle, and would feel free to tell everyone about it for the rest of his days—but Bill had just noticed the two women screwing up their faces in bewilderment and scorn.

“What bloody eyelashes?” Chas was still there, shifting from foot to foot as if he needed to pee, though all he really needed was a drink. Bill felt uneasy. He spoke dismissively, trying to win back lost favor.

“Oh, some crap about the headlight surround on the Miura. Earlier ones had these kind of black strokes at the top and bottom, and they were supposed to look like, you know, when a girl does her eyes, and …” He trailed off. Chas didn’t reply, at least not with anything resembling a word. He puckered his mouth and blew a spitting sound, like someone ejecting an apple pip. Then he lowered his head, turned and melted into the throng around the entrance to the pub.

Pete, too, shook himself, as though coming out of a trance, and said brightly, “Well, mustn’t hang about. Dinner on the table. See you Monday.” He walked up the street toward the Tube. After a minute or so, Bill, who had not said good-bye, went the other way, digging in his pockets for a cigarette that he knew he didn’t have. He was suddenly unhappy, though why he couldn’t say. It was like being a small boy, unable, for a second, to find his parents in a crowd. The two women watched him go. One of them, her hair piled high, reached into the bottom of her glass, retrieved a slice of lemon and began to nibble.

“Like I said,” she told her friend. “Men.”
He was supposed to take Ruth out on Friday nights. Friday nights were girlfriend and curry nights, but he hadn’t been able to face it. Not tonight. Ruth was thrilled with his new job as a rock journalist. Not only was Bill off the dole and no longer an embarrassment, scrounging food out of the fridge in the Bloomsbury mansion-block flat she shared with Lesley and Judith, a couple of trainee solicitors; he was also doing something that lent Ruth herself a certain cool. For a museum assistant, who spent her days photocopying layouts of Anglo-Saxon burial mounds while dreaming of something less dead, it was thrilling to be able to say the word boyfriend in the same sentence as the name Mick Jagger. Bill had never known her so proud or so happy. It was hideous.

Obviously, he would never set out to deceive the girl he was supposed to love. It was just that when Ruth asked for more details of Bill’s brilliant new writing job, he had been physically unable to speak the words Essential David Cassidy Magazine. Until that moment, he had not realized that the one thing he truly feared about women was their disappointment. Worse than anger, worse even than tears, female disappointment seemed almost operatic in its power to make the male feel worthless.

When you asked them what was wrong on their birthday and they said, “Oh, nothing”—that was the worst. For some reason, “Oh, nothing” was to be even more feared than a simple “Nothing.” A long apprenticeship as little brother to two older sisters, who alternately petted him or told him to get lost, had not prepared Bill for a girlfriend who expected you to read her mind, often, it seemed, before that mind was made up.

Ruth was kind enough to be glad for him about the job. But mainly, he suspected, she was chuffed that choosing Bill as a boyfriend had finally paid off. The loser known as Socks by her flatmates, because of the cheesy trail he left around the flat, was suddenly a man to be reckoned with. Lesley and Judith were both engaged, one to a civil engineer, the other to a wine merchant in Parsons Green. He had seen Ruth struggling bravely through the flatmates’ shared rapture over Lesley’s engagement ring—a sapphire with flanking slabs of diamonds. “White gold,” she reported. “They had it made to order at Hatton Garden. Chose the diamonds and everything.” So when it came to telling Ruth about his work, Bill had settled for “journalist” and “music business.” Not untrue, though not exactly true, either.

He thought there would be loads of time to put her right later. But the night he accepted the offer from Roy Palmer, Ruth had given him a hero’s reception when he got back to the Bloomsbury flat. There was a whole chicken cooked in some kind of brick with baked potatoes followed by roasted peaches. He had only ever tried tinned with condensed milk. After the afters, there was sex of a kind Ruth had never offered before; if not quite the kind of sex that rock stars had, or even the kind that he thought they had, then certainly the kind that he thought she thought they had. Which was rock star enough for him, to be getting on with. He felt like a peach. Fuzzy with pleasure. So, after that, Bill was in no real hurry to set Ruth straight about how he spent his days. When would be the best time to reveal to your girlfriend that you composed flirtatious letters to lovesick thirteen-year-olds?

Never would be the best time.

The lies Bill had told weighed heavily on him, though even worse was the thought of all the lies he would have to tell in the foreseeable future, with larger lies brought in to bury the smaller fragments. Bill was up to his neck in layer upon layer of untruth, as though interred in one of Ruth’s burial mounds. He had already had to pretend that he was writing under an alias when Ruth asked to see the reviews, which he hadn’t written, in a magazine he didn’t work for. Plus there was the constant threat of discovery. The museum was only ten minutes on foot from Worldwind Publishing. Ruth could easily turn up during her lunch hour. Only the monstrous portrait he had painted of Roy Palmer—a volatile compound of Al Capone and William Randolph Hearst—had thus far kept her away.

Men who lead a double life must get satisfaction from it, or why would they take the risk? That was the theory, but Bill was the sorry exception: his double life had all the dangers of being found out but none of the practical pleasures. Could there be—had there ever been—anything more humiliating than having David Cassidy as your other woman?
You don’t know how many times I wished that I had told you.

You don’t know how many times I wished that I could hold you.
Bill caught himself singing under his breath. Christ. That was the trouble with Cassidy songs. Once they got into your brain they stuck there like chewing gum. Long after he had forgotten all of Tennyson and Keats, he would be able to give a confident rendition of “How Can I Be Sure.”

There had been a nasty moment, a couple of weekends before, when he had gone round to Ruth’s flat to pick her up on the way to a party, and for once—unusual for her, since she was so much more punctual than him—she wasn’t ready. “Give me five mins,” she had said, which meant fifteen. So he had idled the time away in the girls’ living room, read the spines on the bookshelf and sneered at some of the titles, then felt guilty about the sneer. I mean, why shouldn’t a woman read Jonathan Livingston Seagull if she wanted to? It was a free country, wasn’t it? Just so long as it wasn’t his woman. Please, God, not Ruth. Please, Ruth, not that.

And then, from one of the other bedrooms, a voice began to carol: “I’m. Just. A.” The notes climbed, and as they reached the top, a second voice joined in from the bathroom. Absentminded voices, as of singers happily busy with something else, clipping on an earring in front of the mirror; no more than a musical doodle, really. Lesley and Judith, too, were getting ready to go out, for an orgiastic evening with the civil engineer. And into the doodle there cut a third voice, well out of tune: “Will whoever is singing that bloody song please stop it right now!”

Bill stood there in horror, listening to Ruth as if he’d never heard her shout before—as if he hardly knew her. “I can take almost anything. I can manage Brotherhood of Man. I can manage Terry Jacks and his ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ I can even manage Demis Roussos, if you buy me a kebab. But I will not sit in my own flat and listen to David bloody Cassidy, thank you very much. Thank you.”

This was followed, of course, by peals of delighted laughter from the other girls, thrilled to have discovered a sore spot in their fellow lodger. Bill, however, did not laugh. He saw no comedy in Ruth’s outburst against David. He looked into the future, and covered his eyes.
Could You Be David’s Wife?
David’s the first to admit that he has unusual habits, likes and dislikes that might just take a while to get used to! Yes, the girl who falls in love with David will have to like a lot of the same things David does, or at least understand some of the things he does–things that could be a little strange!

For instance, it isn’t unusual for David to be almost ready for bed when suddenly he’ll get back into his clothes! Why? For a midnight stroll, of course!

David’s dating habits could be thought of as strange. It could be common for David to call you at six in the morning, wildly enthusiastic. Let’s go fishing!

So, if you become Mrs. David Bruce Cassidy, you might be awakened at three in the morning to the sound of guitar music.

David’s also fussy about the way his girl would dress or look for him. He can’t stand hairspray–he wants to run his hand through your hair without that sticky feeling. And when he thinks about the wife he’ll have someday, he pictures her getting into bed wearing a fluffy negligee and with a freshly scrubbed face and a beautiful smile–NOT in flannel pajamas with a head full of curlers and a face full of cream!