I Think I Love You

5

All right, have I got:
high coloring that is prone to stubborn spots

delicate pale skin that flushes easily

sallow skin with greasy patches or

none of the above?”

We were in the Kardomah, just off the market square, drinking frothy coffee that they served in Pyrex cups and saucers. We didn’t like the coffee much, but we thought it was American so we swallowed it down. The coffee came scalding hot and burned the back of your throat, then it got cold and scummy without ever being nice to drink. The Kardomah was the coolest café in town, in our opinion. All the flashiest motorbikes were parked out front. Service was slow and the ashtrays got emptied only every other day, but there was a pinball machine next to the door and plastic flowers in a vase on the tables. Coffee was expensive, but Sharon and I could make two cups and a shared toasted teacake last most of the afternoon. You just had to avoid the waitress’s eye, that’s all. That Saturday, the place was packed and we could hardly hear ourselves talk with the noise of the steam machine clearing its throat every few seconds.

We were wearing our ponchos over pointy-collared shirts and cord flares. Mine was brown-and-cream honeycomb, knitted by Mamgu, and I had a crocheted cap, with a two-tone appliquéd flower in lighter chocolate, which I had reluctantly removed to come indoors. I also wore a brown velvet choker, which was a bit tight, but I believed it to be an elegant accessory, plus it added length to my neck. (My neck was one of my weak points.) Sharon was sitting opposite me in a red poncho with a long white fringe and a big smiley David badge on the front. She was reading aloud from the multiple-choice quiz on the Beauty Dos and Don’ts page.

“Well, what d’you reckon, Pet? What skin type am I, then?”

“None of the above,” I said cautiously.

“You’re a b, definitely,” she said circling the answer.

That week it was Gillian’s birthday and we were all in town shopping for presents. We had left Olga and Angela rummaging grimly through the sale bin in Boots. Privately, I was determined that my present would be the best. I thought I had hit the jackpot with the purchase of a Mary Quant blue eye-shadow kit. The color palette went from the pale, almost duck-egg blue of Gillian’s own eyes to a gorgeous rich indigo. In its lacquered black case with the Mary Quant logo, the kit was a thing of giddy beauty and part of the giddiness came from thinking how much it cost. More than I had spent on Christmas presents for both my parents, a concept that made me slightly ill, but I was so excited by the idea of Gillian’s surprise and gratitude that any expense was worth it.

Even when she wasn’t with us, Gillian filled our conversation. She belonged to a type of girl who must always have existed, but that didn’t make her any less fascinating. Gillian’s returning a smock top to Dorothy Perkins because the embroidery on the bust had unraveled was more riveting than any of the rest of us going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. An entire afternoon could be whiled away speculating on whether she was getting back with Stuart. Gillian and Stuart had more breakups than Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. They were our personal film stars.

“Hey, Susan Dey. Deydreamer? Wakey-wakey. Are we doing this quiz or not?” Sharon tapped the red Formica tabletop with a teaspoon to get my attention.

“Don’t mention her name, please,” I protested.

“Susan Dey, lucky bitch,” hissed Sharon without malice, or not much.

Every group needs a common enemy. For Cassidy fans, it was Susan Dey, the actress who played David’s sister in The Partridge Family. I wouldn’t say we hated Susan Dey exactly. I was just annoyed because I wanted to be her, and there couldn’t be two of us, plus she was insultingly pretty and—this really was the final straw—clearly a sweet person. In magazine interviews, Susan always denied there was anything going on between her and David. Although she was working with David every single day, she claimed not to be affected the least little bit by the charms that had worked on half the girls on Earth.

Sharon and me, we had our suspicions, but we preferred to give Susan the benefit of the doubt. The alternative was too upsetting to think about. We spent quite a lot of time studying pictures of her and, although we never said it aloud, I think that we would have conceded that, in a straight contest, David might prefer Susan’s stunning Californian beauty to two Welsh chicks who had to be in bed by eight thirty.

It wasn’t just Susan Dey, mind. Any other women in David’s life were a source of anguished speculation. Last August, our magazine had this photo of a really slim pretty girl with short brown hair who was wearing a bikini and sitting next to him by a swimming pool. The caption said: “David relaxing with a friend.”

What friend? What kind of friend? The girl made me sick with jealousy. Her name was Beverly Wilshire. I couldn’t rest easy until the September issue when the mag ran another photo of the same girl, this time wearing a man’s shirt and jeans. Turns out she wasn’t called Beverly Wilshire after all. That was the name of the hotel where David was staying! She was Jan Freeman, who was David’s stand-in on the set of The Partridge Family. So that was okay, you know. Never thought he’d like a girl with such short hair, anyway.

“Listen to this, then.” Sharon was pressing on with the Beauty Dos and Don’ts, swiftly circling the answers as her pen moved down the page.

One of the things I loved about Sharon was how definite things were for her, how it didn’t seem to occur to her that the world was bewildering or scary in any way. We were forever doing these multiple choices that were supposed to reveal how to make yourself prettier or more attractive or to pinpoint your personality type. Boys weren’t sitting there doing quizzes about what they could do to make us fancy them, were they? But we carried on doing the quizzes anyway. I suppose we were so hungry for clues about how to grow up and be desirable.

Sharon always ringed the answer she felt was right. Fearlessly told the truth about herself. Me, I stared at a, b, c and d for ages, then tried to sneak a look at the upside-down answers at the bottom of the page. Always weighing up which choices would prove that I was the best kind of girl to be, and then going back to change my answers if I didn’t come out as the right personality type. When I finally made a choice, even if it was the right one, I wondered where the others would have led.

Tell you the really chronic thing, I even cheated at multiple choices when I was by myself. Pretending to be better than you really were to other people seemed normal, but trying to kid yourself was weird. I felt furtive and ashamed, just like the time I copied most of Olga’s answers when she sat next to me during a physics test and, by a complete fluke, I got a better mark than her and she knew what I’d done, but she never said a word. Just took her glasses off and rubbed the bridge of her nose in a really disappointed way. I couldn’t seem to stop myself. How can I put this? The fact was other girls seemed real to me in a way I didn’t feel real to myself. I felt as though I was still making myself up in a hurry, improvising from minute to minute. But the funny thing was, I didn’t mind feeling scared and unfinished when I was with Sharon: she was strong and definite enough for the both of us.

My thoughts were disturbed by a loud squawk: “Oh, you’re not gonna believe it, Petra. Listen to this: ‘You scored eight to thirteen. You are very casual with your looks!’ ” Sharon laughed and took a bite of teacake before passing the last bit to me. The currants were burned and tasted like coal, but I was starving.

“Sha, stop reading, will you? It’s bringing me out in a rash.”

“Hang on. Here’s a good bit now. It says, ‘Even if you feel you are the plainest, most problem-plagued girl in the world, these days there’s no excuse—it’s easy to create a new image for yourself because it’s character and tequi—’ ”

“Technique.”

“—technique that really matter.”

Sharon always asked me about words. I did words and she did pictures, that was our deal. She slapped the mag down. The dirty tea things from the previous customers were still on the table and an open packet of sugar scattered over a wide area. “What’s technique when it’s at home?”

I dipped a finger in the froth of the cold coffee, then rolled it in the spilled sugar and slowly licked it clean.

“Mm. The way you do something. Like you drawing a picture or me playing the cello. Good technique is holding the bow right and sitting up properly. Bad technique is slouching, using only a bit of the bow, playing all tense and hunched up. Basically, if you’ve got good technique you get a richer sound.”

Resonance. I remembered the word Miss Fairfax had taught me. When the cello resonates it sounds as beautiful as a forest, if forests could give up their secrets.

Sharon nodded. “You got to play for that Princess Margaret, ’aven’t you?”

“After we get back from seeing David. Got to plan our outfits for the White City first. Think I’m gonna wear my cords and my cream top under my brown bomber jacket. What d’you reckon?”

I was an expert when it came to dodging inquiries about the cello. I loved my instrument as much as I hated talking about it. I wanted to talk about things that made me feel the same as the others. Let me tell you, a cello is not a good instrument if you want to be invisible. Stick to the flute is my advice. The standard response to me carrying the cello was “How you gonna get that violin under your chin?” Not funny after the twentieth time; not that funny the first time. Then, I was lugging my big case onto the school bus a few weeks before and a boy on the backseat stood up and shouted: “Oi, skinny, give us a tune on yer banjo.”

Since then, I’d stopped taking the cello home and kept it behind the upright piano in the small music-practice room at school. My mother and Miss Fairfax both thought I was practicing for the Princess Margaret concert every break and every lunchtime, and I wanted to, I really wanted to, but I couldn’t take the risk of leaving my friends. They might wonder where I was. Worse still, the worry that couldn’t be admitted, not even to myself, was they might not miss me at all—and I would come back one day to find my place was taken. Like a room where they’ve removed a chair and rearranged the furniture so you don’t know the chair was ever there. Karen Jones had been vanished overnight like a lamp no one liked anymore. The other day in PE, Karen had to be partners with Susan Smell. It was a warning and maybe an omen. Plus, I didn’t want Gillian to see me as Miss Hoity Toity up-herself classical music.

Impress Princess Margaret or Gillian Edwards? It was no contest.

“You two finished by any chance?” The waitress stood by our table with a hand on her hip.

“Still going strong,” said Sharon. She had poured the cold tea from the previous customers’ pot into her empty cup and she raised it with a cheery grin toward the waitress, who stalked away.

“That woman’s got a face like a smacked arse.”

“Shar-rrron.”

“She has. Just cos we’re too poor to have proper food. If you have gammon and chips they let you be. Spend a lot on Gillian, did you?”

“Not really. Not much to play with after buying the concert ticket.”

My foot touched the carrier bag under the table and I got a jolt of pleasure thinking about its precious cargo. I was positive that the classy Mary Quant eye-shadow kit would soon change my life for the better. In my head, I was already foreseeing various heart-warming scenes. Gillian ushering the other girls into her legendary bedroom on her birthday. “Have you seen what Petra got me?”

Gillian receiving admiring comments for her makeup on Saturday night at the Starlight disco. “Yes, it’s indigo, actually, from the Mary Quant eye-shadow palette that Petra gave me for my birthday. It was recommended in Jackie.”

When the camera swiveled round, it was me who was center stage for once. Petra being promoted to Gillian’s best friend to the astonishment of the rest of our group. Petra as the wise and effortlessly funny confidante in Gillian’s legendary bedroom. Petra maybe even invited to accompany the Edwardses on their summer camping holiday to France. They were the only people we knew who went abroad.

The Gillian fantasies sort of muddled in with my David dreams, filling up a lot of my waking time as her birthday drew near, and Bach had to take a backseat. I had always been conscientious about practicing. Now, every time I looked at my cello, I felt guilty, as if the cello knew it didn’t come first anymore.

“I got her Pond’s Cold Cream,” Sharon was saying. “Cleanses without drying the skin, leaving it radiant, that’s what the ad says.”

At thirteen, our notions of sophistication were drawn entirely from magazines. We were the perfect consumers, Sharon and me, believing absolutely everything the mags told us. I had an oily T-zone, which I dutifully tried to tame with Anne French Cleansing Milk. A bottle cost a lot, but the pointy blue cap with its pleasing ridges felt good and purposeful as you opened it. It made me feel like I had a skincare regime, which beauty editors said was vital. It was never too early in life to start a skincare regime.

We bought one of those little brown barrels of Linco Beer shampoo because Sharon had read that it gave your hair incredible shine. Did we look like the brunette in the advert with a curtain of hair so glossy you could see your reflection in it? Not a chance. We smelled of hops, which, if you ask me, is in a dead heat with bad eggs for the most sick-making smell in the world. That smell is so bad it makes your ears hurt. During our Linco Beer period, Sharon’s Uncle Jim asked if we’d started brewing our own. It was not the kind of male attention we’d had in mind.

There were so many problems girls like us could have. And those posh women up in London, well, they had all the answers:
The current trend is for delicate, highly curved brows, unlike your own, which grow thick, dark and bushy! Which of the following do you do?
Pluck them fiercely into a thin, fashionable line

Leave them just as they are, unfashionable or not

Trim up the untidy bits at the inner edge, thin down the outer edge to a narrow line and lighten the general effect with some brow coloring of a lighter color

Pluck them evenly along the whole length, taking hairs mainly from underneath
A surprising amount hung on that question. We worried about eyebrows a lot. Mine were a pair of hairy caterpillars straight out of the Ugly Bug Ball, from Dad’s half of the family. Not like my mother’s. She had Grace Kelly arches, of course. But I didn’t want to make the same mistake as Angela, who had plucked hers from on top and now they wouldn’t grow back. Eyebrows were like the punctuation marks of a face; you didn’t realize how they made sense of the rest until they were missing.

The magazines generally had seven pages of things you had wrong with your looks, followed by an article called “Confidence and How to Get It.” One day, when we were much older, we might have a laugh about that, but not yet. If our skins were still problematic and subject to uncontrollable eruptions, then so were our hearts; agonizingly tender and so easily hurt.

Mags could make you do really crazy things, mind. That afternoon in the Kardomah, Sharon announced she was getting a perm. She’d been reading about Problem Face Shapes.
A round face can easily look like a full moon, especially if you have the wrong kind of haircut. Fringes don’t improve round faces and neither do short cuts. Hair is crucial so aim for width at the side. A light perm will give body to your hair and need only make it slightly wavy if you don’t fancy a head of curls.
“Go on, you’ve got gorgeous hair, what are you on about?” I said.

Sha’s sunny face was suddenly shadowed with doubt. Her baby-blond mane was so fine I couldn’t imagine it in any other style. Out of all of us, Sharon came closest to the ideal Disney princess. It wasn’t just the long golden hair that flicked up happily at the ends. There was such a sweetness in her, any minute you expected her to throw open the window and start singing to the birds, who would come in and help her make a dress. “ ’Sall right for you with your cheekbones.” Sharon sucked in her cheeks till they were concave. She looked like Mamgu with her dentures out. “My face looks like the blimmin’ moon.”

“Stop it. I look like a whippet that needs a square meal, I do.”

“You want your ’ead examining, you do, Petra Williams. You’re like a model, you are. I’m fat,” she said flatly.

“No you’re not. You’ve lost loads of weight, mun. Look at that top, it’s baggy on you.”

And so we carried on the game, the eternal ping-pong of female friendship, the reassurance that never truly reassures, but we crave it anyway. The game that always ends in a score draw, if you want to keep your friend.

The waitress came up and banged down the metal plate with the bill. “It’s not a hotel, you know.”

We paid and walked along the street to the seafront. In a few minutes we were on the concrete steps that led down to the pebbled beach. After the warm, soupy air of the café, the sea breeze was like a slap. When I opened my mouth wide, the salty air blew all the way down to my lungs. From across the bay came the mournful sound of the hooter that told you it was tea break at the steelworks. In the distance, I could see the flame flickering on top of the gas tower. It never went out. My dad would be eating the sandwiches my mother made for him. Ham and cheese every day. Schinken mit Käse, my mother would say under her breath as she wrapped them in greaseproof paper. Dad asked for less butter, too thick a layer turned his stomach. Mine, too. He never asked for anything else.

Sharon was scrutinizing the pebbles on the beach and I sat next to her, knees tucked under my chin, poncho pulled tight around me. She was always searching for the perfect pebble, especially the ones she said looked like thrushes’ eggs. Very pale greeny-blue with a sprinkle of black spots. She liked to draw them. Filled page after page of a sketchbook with them.

I told Sha I was afraid my plan for going to see David would never work. The small white lies I’d told my mother were already getting bigger and grayer. I had written the story I’d told my mum so far in my diary and put it in the hiding place under my bed so I could keep track of all the fibs. The thought of my mother finding out that I was going to a pop concert was as painful as the thought of not going with the others to the White City.

Sharon said everything would be okay, she and her mum would cover for me. That was one advantage to my mother refusing to mix with any women in the town because they were all common and went out to the fish van in slippers with curlers in their hair. At least she couldn’t compare notes with the other mums.

I loved it down there by the pier. My mother claimed the sea was depressing. Ach, always coming in and out, reminding you that it had been going in and out before you were born and would be going in and out centuries after you’d died. The sea was indifferent to human suffering, my mother said. But I found comfort in the things she hated. The sucking of the sea as it drew breath to come in and then the roar as it pulled back, dragging the pebbles with it. Nature’s lullaby, like a mother saying hush forever to a crying baby. Shhuuussssh. Shhooooossh. If you laid your head right back and molded your arms and legs into the pebbles, you could feel yourself disappearing. That was a good feeling; not being there anymore. I liked to do it in the summer when the warmth of the stones got into your bones.

Every time we went down to the beach the sunset was different. Sometimes the clouds were so beautiful and crazy that if you painted them like they really looked, people would have said you were making it up. That evening, the sun was like a lozenge that had been sucked until it was so thin it was about to break.

“Look,” I said to Sharon, “a Strepsils sunset.”
I told my mother we were going to see Handel’s Messiah.

I knew she’d approve. She liked high culture. In fact, she approved of altitude in general. High heels, high opera, highball glasses that she got from the Green Shield Stamps catalog and filled with lime and Cinzano Bianco and loads of crushed ice. “The poor woman’s cocktail,” she called it. Tall men in high places would have been my mother’s ideal.

It wasn’t a complete lie about the Messiah. There would be singing and worship of a kind and we would need to take a train and money for something to eat. I had found the concert in the Forthcoming Events section of the South Wales Echo. Same night as David’s White City concert, May 26, only it was in Cardiff, not London. So it was perfect, really.

Except this was the first big lie I’d told her in my life and I was scared from the start. If I hadn’t wanted to go so badly, I’d never have dared. My heart felt like a fish flubbing around in a net that was gradually being pulled tighter and tighter.

“Handel is sublime,” my mother had said when I told her. “What is the choir, Petra?”

“The Cwmbran Orpheus,” I said.

“Not bad. Really not of the highest, but not szo bad,” she said, removing a leather glove and raking a hand through her wavy blond hair. “I am glad you make this effort, Petra. Your friends are nice girls, really I hope, good families and so on?”

“Yes.” I tried to think of my mother meeting Sharon’s family, but my mind blanked at the prospect.

We were standing in the narrow, stepped bit of land at the back of the house that my dad had turned into a fruit and vegetable patch. It was a garden to feed us. The only concession to decoration was a row of sweet peas along the brick wall that divided us from Mr. and Mrs. Hughes next door. (Even after seventeen years my parents were still not on first-name terms with their neighbors, and never would be, not in Wales.) The green stalks of the sweet peas twirled upward around wigwams made of bamboo. When they appeared, the flowers—in pink and white and violet—looked like the finest paper rosettes. Sweet peas were the kind of flowers fairies slept in. Carol told us one day that she didn’t believe in God. He had just been invented by old men to stop young people enjoying themselves. But, I ask you, why would Nature go to so much trouble to make something so pointlessly beautiful as the sweet pea?

The scent was delicate and strong at the same time. Intoxicating. That was a word from “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power.” “Noun: intoxication, an abnormal state that is essentially a poisoning. The condition of being drunk. A strong excitement or elation.”

My mother taught me to cut the flowers every single day of summer; if you did that, they kept coming back. She admired the sweet pea for its abundance, I think, but also for its determination not to let beauty die.

To anyone else, I suppose it wouldn’t have looked like much of a garden, but I loved being out there with my dad. It was our place. He would smoke his pipe and, when it went out, I ran back indoors to fetch his matches. He had a pouch for his tobacco, and we would sit on the top step behind the compost while Dad scraped out the sticky black stuff from the pipe with a match, then he would take ages pressing the new stuff in, tamping the brown leaf down till it was like a nest. Dad said I was clever like my mother, because I could read music and got all the grades. But he was the clever one, I’m telling you.

When Dad was my age, he taught himself the tonic sol-fa and he could play anything he liked. Bought the piano in our front room out of the wages he’d saved until he was eighteen. I didn’t think it was right that when my father was a boy he went down the pit and had to crawl on his elbows and knees to get the coal. But Dad said they were champion days.

“Best men in the world, cariad, you couldn’t ask for better.”

He was sorry when he had to come back to the surface, a job at the steelworks, on account of his bad lungs. Six syllables. New mow cone ee owe sis. It was the longest word I knew. Pneumoconiosis. Occupational hazard.

Out in the garden, where we wouldn’t disturb my mother, my father would warm up his voice: “Doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, te, doh.” You had to breathe from the diaphragm, see, give each note its full weight.

At the bottom of the garden steps, there was a small brick outhouse that was a toilet before they took a corner of one of our three bedrooms and made it into a bathroom. When I was small, Dad used to carry me out there at night, hitch up my nightie and sit me on the wooden seat. I tried to hold the pee in and let it out quietly because I didn’t want to wake the spiders. The spiders were huge and their webs festooned the brick walls like net curtains for ghosts.

Climb to the top of our path and you got the most incredible view. The sea was spread out like a glittering cloak all the way across to Pendine Sands, where a man set the world land speed record. You could always tell when a storm was on its way in. The sky over the sea was the color of a saucepan and the clouds turned a sinister yellow, as though the sun behind them was sickening for something.

“Quickly, please. Hold this bush while I tie it, Petra.”

The black currant bushes were threshing around in the wind the Saturday before we went to White City. My mother got me to hold each bush while she fixed it with a small piece of twine to a cane. The twine was kept in the front pocket of her suede jerkin and she cut it with a knife. Even when she was gardening my mother appeared chic. That morning, she was wearing some Land Girl–type jodhpurs, which would have made any other woman look like a water buffalo, and a man’s shirt tucked in under a belt that was two shades darker than the trousers. A paisley scarf was loosely knotted at her breast. She looked as dashing as Amelia Earhart standing next to her airplane.

“Right as rain,” my mother shouted at the sky. “What is so right about rain? Why are the British saying this? Fruits, they need sun.”

She snatched up a hoe and appeared to point the rusty tip accusingly at my dad, who was sitting on the top step smoking his pipe and just looking at her. The weather was his fault. Everything was his fault. He smiled and threw his hands up in surrender.

“It’s only a saying, Greta. Don’t take it personal, love. It’s May. There’s plenty of time for them to ripen.”

“Ach, but they will have no flavor. Only rain flavor.”

If he could have gone up to the sky and fetched the sun down for her on his back he would, I knew that. My father worshipped my mother, though he never found the right sacrifices to appease her. As far as she was concerned, he had won her by false pretenses, and she would never forgive him for it. When they met, Glynn Williams was the star of the town’s operatic society and my mother was a young soprano. Their duet from Kismet got a write-up in the local paper.

My mother made a mistake. She thought Dad was going up in the world, when it turned out he had just climbed a hill for a while to take in the view.

My father had a look of Clark Gable, or so Gwennie in the grocer’s told Mrs. Price the Post. I’d never seen Mr. Gable, so I didn’t know. Every morning, when Dad left home for the steelworks on his motorbike, I would stand by the upstairs landing window and watch him. The deal I struck with God was that if I watched my father till he got right to the end of the road, and never took my eyes off him for one second until he disappeared round the corner, then God would bring him back safe to me. It always worked, so I never dared stop looking.

The family on my father’s side were short and dark. In old wedding photographs you might take them for Sicilians. My mother mistook Dad’s stocky good looks for manly purpose, while he mistook her angelic blondness and full lips for sweetness. Her disappointment with him colored our days.

The story went that her parents had bought a passage from Hamburg to New York, but the boat docked at Cardiff one night and they got off in a hurry, thinking it was Manhattan. (Fog, tiredness, a baby crying at the wrong moment.) It was an embarrassing piece of bad timing for a celebrated family of German clockmakers. Growing up in four rooms over a watch shop in the High Street, my mother felt she had been cheated of her destiny. She craved a bigger stage, the one her face deserved. The life her beauty had been designed for was out there somewhere, ebbing away as the shop’s clocks ticked and tocked.

It’s so hard for a child to understand her parents’ unhappiness. Mine, if only I’d known it, were infected with the virus of incompatibility. Nobody died from it, but nobody lived, either. My mother stayed put and, well, you’d have thought she was a normal wife and mother, but her offended spirit got its revenge.

Anything could set her off. Me reading a book. Me not reading a book. Greasy hair, spots, which she regarded as self-inflicted although everyone got them, girls and boys. I used to wonder if I was an only child because I’d been such a disappointment.

There were so many times I wanted to tell my mother about the boys barking at me in class, but it would have meant mentioning Petra the TV dog, and I knew how angry that would make her. She would suspect I had been watching the idiot box. Instead, one night after a really bad day at school, I asked her if I could please be called by my middle name, Maria.

She raised the palette knife she was using to free a cheesecake from its tin and swiped it at me, narrowly missing my cheek. “No, why are you asking this, you stupid, stupid girl? I told you Petra is a fine name, it was the name of my aunt, who was really a most elegant person in Heidelberg. If you ask me one more time you will be punished, you stupid girl, do you hear?”

When she went out, my dad liked to dance me round the front room. We weren’t allowed in there with our shoes on. There was a big black radiogram with mesh on the front with a gold surround and three cream Bakelite knobs. Normally, it was tuned to live classical concerts, but on Sunday mornings we were allowed to turn the knob to Family Favorites. My mother approved of Family Favorites because the show was sometimes broadcast from Germany. Soldiers stationed out there sent record requests for their loved ones back home.

Every Friday night, my mother took my father’s wage packet from him and gave him an allowance to go down to the club. “Your father, he can’t be trusted with money,” she said. He was always my father when she was angry. You should have heard him sing, though. Even in a land famous for song, Dad’s baritone stood out. “I’ve Got a Cruuuussh on You, Sweetie Pie.” That was one song he sang to me. One day, with Dean Martin crooning “That’s Amore” on the radiogram next door, Dad took me in his arms and whirled me round the kitchen. I imagined being in a hot place with my hair pinned up by a single red flower. I imagined being glamorous.
“Well, we are going to see the Messiah. Kind of.”

Sharon cracked up. She thought the alibi I had given my mum for where I’d be on May 26 was brilliant.

We were sitting with Gillian on the grassy bank just above the rugby pitch, talking about our plans for White City.

“Genius, Pet,” Sharon said. “David is a god to us and you can wear your Sunday-school clothes to go out the house and after you can get changed into your gear round mine. Then you can stay the night when we get back so your mam’ll never suspect, will she?”

Sharon’s Uncle Jim worked on the railways, in the signal box at Port Talbot, so he’d given her the time of the late train coming back. It was specially for people who went up to London for the shows. We were sure we could get the 11:45 p.m. if we left the concert the minute it ended.

“What are you two wearing to London?” Gillian asked. Her blue eyes were fixed on the game below, where Stuart was acting captain of the school team.

Sharon let out a groan. “Oh, God help us, just think what Carol will wear to meet David.” Puckering her lips into a familiar sink-plunger pout, Sha gathered her small breasts in both hands and pushed them up until they were like two blancmanges wobbling over the top of her school blouse. She stood up and started strutting around with her chin jabbing forward and her bum pushed out in imitation of Carol’s stroppy cockerel strut.

“She’ll wear a blimmin’ bikini and get us all arrested,” I said.

We both laughed, not unkindly, at the thought of our sexy friend. Gillian ignored our fooling. She was doing that ladylike poise thing she did whenever there were boys around.

Down on the pitch, the game was turning nasty. Our team, in red and white, was playing a school from the Valleys. Great hulking brutes, they were. The ruck was peeling apart and one ox came bellowing out from the tangle of limbs and lashed out at our prop, till both had blood on their mouths.

Suddenly, the ball was free and one of our boys got a hand to it. He hugged it to his chest, sidestepped the ox and put on a burst of speed. God, he was fast, mind. The guys who hurled themselves at him looked like they were diving at thin air. For a moment, in the thick of the action, the boy somehow made time for himself. It was magic, the way he seemed to be running in slow motion inside his own private bubble while the other players flailed around him. He got over the line, lightly touched the ball to the ground and turned round, a grimy grin splitting his fair face. Steven Williams.

“Hey, he’s waving at you, Petra,” Sharon said.

“He’s waving at us,” said Gillian, who was on her feet, clapping and cheering.

All my life I would remember that try. See Steven running down the wing, making a mockery of the blundering beasts around him.

Some things never die.