I Think I Love You

6

It’s you. You are David Cassidy.”

Zelda was standing next to Bill’s desk in the office, holding up a sweater. It was sleeveless, knitted in stripes of red and white wool, with a row of buttons down the front that winked silver in the light. Around the hem was a strip of wobbling blue, with small stars uncertainly picked out in white. “And look at the back.” She flipped it round to reveal a large capital D in silver satin, stitched somewhere between the shoulder blades. “Stand up,” said Zelda, and Bill, feeling ten years old, did so without hesitation. What power did this majestical woman wield over him, he wondered, that he should rise at her call? She pressed the sweater against his chest. Bill had the second button of his shirt unbuttoned, like someone in an aftershave commercial, and for a second he could actually feel the hairs on his chest stick to the silver D. It was not a pleasant feeling.

“And it fits, Billy!” she went on. “Like I said, it’s just you.” Billy? Nobody had called him Billy since a boy called Newsome in the third form, who had veered away with a nosebleed.

“Don’t call me Billy,” he said, in a low voice. “Please.” He could see Pete the Pimple, at the far end of the room, working up a smirk.

“Sorry, William dear,” said Zelda. Everything bounced off her, including slights and hurts of every description, whether given or taken. She shook the sweater. “Look at it glitter, though. And have you realized how the stars and stripes are meant to look like the American fl—”

“Yes, I did notice. Though it’s sort of upside down.” Together, they marveled at the wondrous object. Here, at last, was proof that knitwear could ruin your eyes. It had arrived that morning in a brown box, plastered with 1p stamps. The box sat now at her feet. “Who’s it from?”

“Clare Possit.” Zelda put down the sweater and produced a rose-pink envelope from some concealed pocket of her floor-length tangerine dress, which looked like it came from Marrakesh and jingled as she moved. “Clare Possit, 47 Lucknow Road, Shrewsbury. Aged fourteen, brown hair, twenty-seven posters, one rabbit called Partridge.”

“Christ.”

“Yes, well. Likes toasted sandwiches and knitting. Hence this lovely sweater. Would like to be Mrs. David Cassidy when she grows up.”

“If she grows up. If he grows up.”

“Now, now. Clare has been very busy, I’d like you to know. As well as a sweater she encloses a woolly hat, for Manchester you understand.”

“Of course. In May.”

“And also a pair of socks.” Zelda delved into the box and held them up gingerly, away from her, as you might a pair of poisonous caterpillars. Bill leaned closer, genuinely interested.

“That one says ‘CHE’ on it,” he said. “Like Guevara. Is Clare Possit a Maoist? Does Mrs. Possit know about it? Do they even do Cuban liberation in Shrewsbury? I never knew.” He paused, and his face fell. “Oh, I see.” Zelda was holding up the sock’s sad twin. It bore the legend RISH.

“Together,” said Zelda, brightly, “they spell out—”

“Yes, I geddit.” Bill considered the socks. To his surprise, he had not yet ceased to be surprised by the madness of Cassidy love. David was still basically a kid, and the likelihood of his ever being allowed to become a man seemed slimmer by the day; either he would be torn asunder by his fans, like a stag among hounds, or else he would be frozen in eternal youth, the way that rich Californians had their corpses stowed in dry ice. And he couldn’t sing—not like Jagger, anyway, or Bowie, or any of the grown-up gods. Next to Cassidy, even Marc Bolan was a proper adult male, and he wore eye shadow, for God’s sake. And a feather boa. But—and the thought of this niggled Bill, and wouldn’t go away—you had to hand it to the Cassidy guy: he could stir up love. He was like a witch with a cauldron. Bill had fancied, at college, that he knew a bit about love—not as a condition of the heart (God help him), but as a tactic that poets and painters used, an artist’s strategy for getting women into bed, or getting yourself into their heads. But this boy, this American pansy, he could manufacture an emotion out of nowhere, out of nothing, and sort of squash it into a song, like Clare Possit’s cramming socks into that brown box. And when the girls unwrapped it at the other end—when they heard it, alone in their bedrooms—they not only believed it, they believed he had believed it in the first place; they even believed it was directed specifically at them.

The fools, the uncountable fools. Shakespeare had his Dark Lady, maybe a bloke on the side, but how many could David win over with one verse, one yelp of that watery voice, one sideways nudge of the bum? Millions of them, tens of millions of Clares and Judiths and Christines, all utterly convinced that they were cherished, both che’d and rish’d; that they were in love, as you might be in Shrewsbury or Wigan or Weston-super-Mare, but also, in return, that they were loved. Pop ruled the world. Poets were left for dust.

“Zit city.”

He came out of his reverie with a start. For an instant, his head spun. Pete was beside him, pushing a picture into his frame of vision. Where was Zelda? While Bill was dreaming, she must have sailed away.

“Look at that.” Pete poked at something with his finger, which was gray with graphite at the tip; he had flecks of white in the nail, too, which Bill’s grandmother used to say was evidence of a bad diet. Well, she got that right. Two days ago, Bill had seen Pete force a Kit Kat into the hollowed-out crust of a Cornish pasty, and then eat the whole thing. Had he already eaten the meat and veg from the middle, or simply scooped them out with his slaty fingers and thrown them away? And here he was, bent over, rich of breath, showing Bill a photograph. No, two photographs.

“Before and after,” he said. “Like one of them weight wanker ads.” He sniffed hard and rubbed his nose with a knuckle. “Normally I wouldn’t take a copy, you know, just tart up the one. But this was so good I thought you ought to see the original, before I got to work. You being new and everything.”

For all Bill knew, that may have been a kindly offer, wise counsel from an old hand, but somehow it came out sounding like an insult. So did everything that dripped from the lips of Pete.

“Afters first.” It was a black-and-white head shot of David Cassidy; his back was to the camera but he had turned round, coy as a deer, glancing over his shoulder to tell the world’s females to come hither. Or, if they were minded, just to come. Sex must get in there somewhere. His lashes, with their graceful curve, were absurdly long—could they be forever?—and his skin was as flawless as a saucer of milk.

“Okay, now what? It’s a girly-boy.”

“Now look at her.” Pete gave a terrible grin, and slid another image into view. “Before.” Bill looked.

“Oh Jesus.”

Every teenager had spots, but this guy had a problem. His erupting, pitted cheeks might have aroused the professional curiosity of a vulcanologist.

“Jesus,” Bill repeated. “It’s like looking at the moon.” Then, realizing that praise would be in order, he turned to Pete. “Great job, mate. Magic wand and all that. Cassidy doesn’t know you, but he bloody well needs you.”

“F*ck off,” Pete said, to indicate that he was pleased.

“How d’you do it?”

“Ink, whitener, chronic little brush. Pencil and rubber, sometimes. You kind of … stipple over the bumps.”

Without ado, wary of talking about his art, or anything that might smack of art, he pulled the images from Bill’s grasp and marched off. He had come over to show off his handiwork, received due credit, yet gone away angrier than he had come. Like many workers in the office, Pete conducted himself like a sour, superannuated child. Was that the fault of management, Bill asked himself, or was it just the job—the inevitable result of spending too much time up to your neck in other people’s adolescent dreams?

The phone rang. It was beige, all angles instead of curves, and too light to stay in one place. Bill picked up the receiver, and the cradle, responding to his tug, fell off the edge of the desk.

“Shit,” said Bill, very loudly. Zelda, who was passing, gave him a stern look. Other people could purse only their lips, but she could do it with her whole face.

“Don’t swear,” said a voice on the other end of the line.

“Who is this?” Bill asked. “Oh, Ruth, hi. No, sorry, I dropped the, hang on, wait a sec.”

He retrieved the cradle and tried to balance it on a pile of letters. “No, it’s not a bad time at all. I just—Yes. Yes, fine. Sorry?”

Zelda had stopped now, and was watching him struggle with the phone. Suddenly she stuck out her tongue.

“Christ,” said Bill. “Sorry, no, love. It’s just Zelda’s doing something with her tongue. No, her tongue. Zelda. She’s my—Sorry? No, my boss …”

Zelda had put one finger to her mouth, pretended to lick it, then used it to make little swirling motions in the air. Bill didn’t know where to look. Why was his immediate superior choosing this moment, above all, to offer what looked like intimate sexual services? Did she bear a grudge against Ruth? Neither of these options seemed likely. The week before, after all, Zelda had refused a Cadbury Flake on the grounds that it was “a bit rude.”

“No, love, I’m, I’m, I’m busy with—tour schedules, setting up interviews. Yes. Who with? Oh, you know, big names. No, not that big. I mean not yet.”

He was conscious of starting to squirm. Zelda was looking at him oddly, still doing something unfathomable with her hand.

“No, but God I’d love to. Or Jimmy Page. Yeah, I know. You know they banned the last album in Spain? Cos of the kids on the front? Yeah, I know …”

Bill watched as Zelda reached out and took the cradle of the Trimphone from the paper pile. The letter on top had the legend I HATE LITTLE JIMMY OSMOND pasted down the side in blue Dymo tape. Zelda licked her finger again, turned the phone over, then used her fingertip to moisten the round rubber feet on its base. Finally, she cleared a patch of space on Bill’s desk and plunked the cradle down, firmly pressing until it stuck. “There,” she said, with pride, and walked off, singing, in her deep, vibrating alto, “Stair-air-way to heh-uh-ven.” Bill put his head in his hands, the phone against his skull. Dimly he was aware that Ruth was still talking. Her voice hummed in his head.

“Mm, yup. Well, I’m meeting the boys after work. What? You know, the other guys.”

He lowered his head, sneaked a glance around the immediate area, sank his voice to a whisper. “The band. What? I am speaking up. I said the band.” Someone two desks away looked up. Nobody he knew, a newcomer holding a giant stapler—but still, couldn’t be too careful.

“No, I’ll be done around nine thirty, ten,” Bill continued, voice back to normal now. “Yeah, the Grapes. See you then. Better go. Oh, you know. Rock never sleeps and all that. Yep. Okay, bye.”

Bill tipped his head back and thought about Ruth for a while. Outside, the sunlight had paled, and showers tapped on the window. The office was growing darker, but the lights hadn’t been turned on; not because of the note that had circulated last week, warning of electricity costs, but because no one could be bothered to reach for a switch. Some of them, like Chas, openly preferred the gloom.

Bill bent to his keyboard again and became another person. He wrote of his sun worship, and how he couldn’t live without his musical instruments (“if anyone wanted to torture me, they’d only have to take away my drums and guitar”), and apologized for his raggedy scrawl. Then he stopped and counted the words he had produced so far. Eleven hundred and thirty. Perfect. Should he be proud, as a journalist, or ashamed, as a man, to bring the stuff in like this—on time, to length, right on the button? Just room for a sign-off: “Don’t gorget … Keep a place warm for me in your hearts till I can get there to fill it. Till then, Love—”

He was aware of a shadow moving in front of him, around him to his back, but so rapt was he in the act of impersonation that he couldn’t be bothered to look up. So it came as a shock when four words were breathed beside his neck, in a low growl.

“Let me fill it.”

Bill jumped, half up, half backward, trying to halt the spinning in his head. “Whawha,” he said.

“Sorry, cock,” said Roy, mightily pleased by the effect of his interruption. The publisher had come to call.

“No, sorry, my fault,” said Bill, struggling to his feet, like an old man in a pub being introduced to a girl. Why had today, which hadn’t started too badly, ended in a litter of apologies? “Sorry, you were saying …”

“I was sayying,” Roy went on, in the leery tone that he preserved for slower, younger employees, “that you ain’t seen nothing, son. Your pretty boy there, Mr. Cassidy, butter wouldn’t melt, but they say he melts all over the shop, them little ladies sticking their faces through his gate.”

“Surely not. He’s not like that,” Bill replied, unexpectedly turning into his own grandmother.

“Anyway, now you’ll have a chance to find out, won’t you? Cos Mr. Squeaky Clean is coming to dirty old England—”

“Yes, I know. We have tickets.”

“Ah, but you have tickets to the concert, sonny Jim. I’m talking about the press conference before. And not just that. I’m talking about you and Mr. Maytime, head to head, top to toe, just the pair of you, fifteen lovely minutes. You and Cassidy, alone together in a hotel room. There are girls in this country, let me tell you—there are girls at the North bloody Pole who would give their furry knickers for one minute with that nancy in a hotel suite. And you get a quarter of an hour, my son. Don’t waste it. Not queer, are you?”

“I—”

“Good. Cos I’m not sending a poofter to see the bloke when all our readers want to snog him, am I? Don’t want you putting your grubby mitts down his brown clothes, do we now?”

“Come off it, Mr.—”

“All right, all right. You’re doing a grand job, anyway. Born to it. Just don’t ask him what he really thinks or any of that arty bollocks. Nothing about his soul. Doubt if the poor bugger’s got time for it, anyway.”

“Time for what?”

“A soul. He’s just a voice in a shirt, isn’t he? And he can’t be arsed to do the buttons up. Like some people I could mention.” And, with that, Roy idled away, making a chewing sound. Bill surreptitiously reached a hand to his chest and did up one of the buttons. He knew what the boss thought of him. Roy, he knew full well, looked at him and saw a fancy-pants: a smartarse with a poncey shirt and a college degree (as if that was any use), a hireling too scared of life to get his nose into it, too innocent to admit what happens when, as in Roy’s favorite and much-repeated phrase, “pop shit hits the fans.”

He was probably right. All the same, Bill didn’t know what to believe about someone like David Cassidy; he didn’t know what to want to believe. In idle moments, maybe with Ruth asleep at his side, he had wondered what went on when a male of twenty-four years found himself on the receiving end of mass adoration; what literally went on, not in the young guy’s head, but in his bed and at his feet, in hotels and swimming pools and the green rooms of stadiums and television shows. When the worshippers met the boy-god, what was the likely result? Did they swoon or shy away, like the heroines of romantic fiction, unable to bear the fantasy made flesh; or did unromantic fact get the better of them, and force them to their knees?

Bill had heard the rumors about David, couldn’t exactly avoid them, yet something in him chose not to listen: something not just prim and prudish, but protective of the rights of dreamers everywhere.

He must have spent years of his life, after all, thinking about Paul McCartney—not about being McCartney, or becoming McCartney, but holding fast, nonetheless, to an image of Paul somewhere there beside him, larky and quick, showing him the fingering on “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and egging him onward: “Aright, mate, take your time, no hurry. That sounds great, Bill, I can see you’ve been practicing.”

And if Bill had stood there, dreaming of that nonsense, and knowing in his guts that the nonsense made sense, more sense than anything else; well, then what right did he have to mock the silly girls, knitting their DC sweaters and sending their poems and their locks of hair?

“Tread softly, William, for you tread on their dreams.” Zelda’s words, which, at the time they were uttered, had made him choke on a Polo mint, came back to him with the full chiding gentleness of their speaker.

He looked at his watch. Almost three o’clock. Two more hours and he’d be done. In three hours’ time, if Zelda didn’t try to keep him late, and if the Tube wasn’t clogged, and if he could manage to grab a quick scotch beforehand to steady his nerves, and his fingers—all being well, come six o’clock, the music journalist would make music of his own.
Bill played bass in Spirit Level. They were not a well-known band, even to their extended families. Nor would they ever be well-known, not unless they were accidentally caught up in a hostage drama, or played a heroic role in evacuating a pub during a bomb scare, or were, indeed, bombed themselves. That would be bloody typical, wouldn’t it? To achieve immortality instead of fame, selling truckloads of records on the back of having died. All those groupies, wandering round in a daze of admiration, and no one to sleep with …

They had formed at school. “You’re still a bunch of schoolboys, aren’t you?” Ruth had said, on the single, deeply ill-advised occasion when he had invited her to a gig. They had played for twenty minutes above the Duke of York’s in Acton, and Ruth had stood there, shandy in hand, immobile; never had a human being, Bill thought, been less stirred into deep, liberating rhythms by the pulse of popular music. She hadn’t even blinked. Afterward, once they had trudged off to make way for Space Hopper or Spikenard or whoever else was up next, he had sipped his pint and, summoning his courage, asked what she had thought.

“What can I say?” she asked in return, with rather too wide a smile, and the phrase had hung over his head, ever since, like a double-edged sword. But she was right about one thing: they were kids, still. Not just adults reliving their youth, which would have been sad enough, considering what youth was like, but adults using the weaponry of youth—shouting, singing, arguing, mucking around—to pretend that they could fend off the unwanted responsibilities of adult life.

The lead singer was called David Crockett. People would come up to him after a gig and say, “What’s your name again?” and he would answer, “David Crockett.”

“No, your real name.”

“Crockett, really. David Crockett.” Then, without exception, they would say, “Oh, piss off,” and turn away, with a shake of the head.

At school it had been different; everyone knew his name, and the band had decided not to conceal the fact but, more cunningly, to make it their selling point. “You could be David Crockett and the Wild Frontiers,” said Mrs. Crockett, his unflappable mother, as they sat at her kitchen table one afternoon. She always insisted on David, not Davy, which—or so Bill believed—made it slightly harder to maintain the pose of American pioneers. Tolworth was a long way from Oklahoma. It lacked a Gold Rush, for one thing. The suburb was on the southwesterly fringes of London, clinging to the capital’s hem.

They had all been upstairs at the Crocketts’, discussing the swiftness of their path to glory, now that Derek, a psycho in waiting, but also the best guitarist in the school, had joined the band. Their first number one would enter the charts in “early April ’71,” according to the drummer, Colin Hobbs, who was the best at math. Mrs. Crockett had knocked on the bedroom door, put her head round and said brightly, “Tea and Battenberg when you’re ready, boys!” They had interrupted the conversation about private jets and dutifully trooped downstairs, like Scouts.

Bill didn’t know where the original band members were these days. After school, where everyone was afraid of him, Derek had started to run up against kids—young men—who bore just as much resentment as he did, for reasons that none of them could grasp, let alone sort out. In the winter of 1970, just as Bill was starting to think about the use of kissing in Keats, Derek had gotten into a fight at Wimbledon Station. The other boy had ended up on the tracks, with half his chin scraped off, and only just scrambled free. Derek had gotten eighteen months in a place for young offenders and none of them heard from him again. Bill worried about him sometimes, late at night.

Derek’s guitar case might have had two Stanley knives Sellotaped to the inside, but, of all the pupils who tried, and failed, to play the weepy Harrison riff from “Something,” Derek failed least. But he had vanished from their lives, and—more important—from their lineup, and his place had gone to Colin Dougall, who smoked more weed than anyone Bill had ever met, often appearing from a kind of cloud, but who was also the only person he knew who still went to church. The combination seemed unlikely, or plain wrong, although drummer Colin had some elaborate theory about the warm front of cannabis meeting the moist air of incense, and it starting to rain in the nave. Colin Hobbs’s problem, apart from being clever, was that he was called Colin, and, as David pointed out, you couldn’t have a band with two Colins in it. Everyone accepted the logic of this argument, even Colin Hobbs, who went off to Southampton and became, so his mother said, “very into computers.” His place, behind the drum kit, had gone to John Priscumbe, who was too young, then to Michael “Stinky” Sturrock, who smelled, then to a creature called, simply, Brillo, who had lasted a week, and finally, to everyone’s relief, to a solid Lancastrian, Geoff Hymes, who had come to London to make his fortune and wound up mending fridges in Maida Vale. No one could call him a great drummer, and nobody did, but he was genial, and punctual, and, best of all, every other weekend, he had the use of a Ford Transit.

In the meantime, the band had changed its identity even more often than its players. No one had liked the Wild Frontiers, and even Mrs. Crockett went off it after a while. So, for no reason, they became Black Coffee (“the whitest group I know,” said the DJ at the school disco). Then Jetlag. Then Eagle, in tribute to the lunar module, just after the moon landings. (“If we had stuck with it,” David would say, pretty much every month ever since, in the pub, “we could have waited till the Eagles were famous, then sued them for stealing our name.” “But they’re plural,” Bill would reply. “That’s different. And there’s that the.” It was, he often thought, the most pointless conversation of his career.) Then Mandrake Root, once the second Colin was in place. Then, very briefly, the Stitches (the idea being that, at the close of a triumphant career, they could release a Greatest Hits album titled The Stitches: In Time). And now they were Spirit Level, and, as Bill announced with something more than modesty to anyone who would listen, they were still as bad and unfocused as they had been when Mrs. Crockett gave them all a slice of Battenberg, with a cake fork each. Names could come and go, talent could rise and fall, but Spirit Level were, and always would be, underperformers. Their cover version of “All Right Now,” repeated, yet unrefined, over many drunken weddings, still sounded, as Bill had confided to a friend at university, “like a double-decker bus running over a herd of cows.” The band was the one dependable constant in his life, but it was more than that. It was—though he would never admit as much to himself, let alone to Ruth—his one true love.
“Gorget.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Gorget.” Zelda held out the sheet of paper. She had swanned by, seen Bill sipping a cup of coffee and plucked the letter from his typewriter, with a zipping sound. “Typo near the end. You’ve got gorget instead of forget. And you haven’t signed it.”

“I think they’ll know who it’s from.”

“Don’t you be too sure,” said Zelda, who looked as if she might at any moment wag a finger at him. “The boy we had before you, no, two before you, not counting the pervert, he once finished a letter from David and signed it Brian.”

“Why?”

“Because that was his name, silly. He was so … into it, as you might say, that he forgot who was who.”

“Like Method.”

“I beg your pardon?” To Zelda, the word sounded suspicious, as if it might be connected with sex.

“Nothing,” said Bill. “So was he the pervert?”

“No, the perv—Look, I don’t have time for this sort of, of, tittle-tattle.” Zelda was flushed. “Please just make the corrections.”

“What did he perv about?”

“William, really, I have far better things to do … If you could just go through this one more time.”

“So it’s all right, then?”

“A lovely piece of work, just lovely.” Zelda was on safer ground now. “I particularly like the part about him being a medieval minstrel. Very … imaginative.”

“Well, he said something about that once himself. I’m just following his lead. I’m not really, you know, making it up. Am I?” he went on, more in blank pleading than in curiosity.

“You’re doing an excellent job. Much better than Brian, who, if he had a fault, did rather let the whole thing go to his head.”

“In what way? Did he start wearing the kit?”

“Sorry?”

“You know, the catsuit? The shell necklace? Did he wear it here, at this desk? On a Tuesday?”

Zelda chose not to reply. She merely picked up a bottle of Tipp-Ex and handed it to Bill. “Correct.” And with that she moved on.

The top of the Tipp-Ex had stuck tight. Bill twisted it, swore and twisted again. It flew off, and a blurt of white liquid flew over Bill’s right hand and up his wrist. Chas, as if on cue, picked this instant to stroll past.

“Filthy little bugger. Right where everyone can see.”

“Sorry?”

Chas wheezed and cackled, like the sidekick of a stage villain, and slunk toward the Gents. Bill sat there, wiping his wet hands. The phone rang, and he reached for it. As he took hold of the receiver, the cradle popped unstuck, with a faint squelching sound, and fell off the edge of the desk.

“Sod. This,” said Bill, very loudly. “Soddit.” The phone was covered in correcting fluid, so he just said, “Sorry,” and dropped the receiver on the floor, where it went on squawking for a while. Using his left hand, he fed the sheet of paper back into the typewriter, rolled it down and, with a single finger, stabbed the word David. “And sod you,” he said, again out loud. “Little prick.”

“Who you talking to?” said the man he didn’t know, a couple of desks away.

“No one.”

The man gave a quick, jeering grin. “Rock never sleeps, eh?”

Bill had run out of the strength to be angry. He just looked over and sighed.

“More like pop never wakes up,” said the man. He laughed at his own joke, and lowered his head to his work. The rain outside was thicker now: angry but bereft of rhythm, like the drumming of Colin Hobbs. Suddenly, Bill had no desire to make music among friends. He wanted to go to sleep.

The squawking wouldn’t stop. Bill retrieved the phone from under his feet. “Yes?”

“William, it’s Zelda.” This was not good. Zelda’s office was only twenty seconds away, and, as a rule, she liked to launch herself through the gap in the potted-plant partition and cruise around the desks of her colleagues. The other day, Bill had introduced her to the phrase shooting the breeze, which had never come her way before—Zelda’s language, and indeed her world, stopped short at the frontier of the Home Counties—and she had mulled it over, tasting the words, and pronounced at last, “I like that.” From now on, if there was a breeze to be shot, she would shoot it; and the only thing to keep her from shooting was unwelcome news. When forced to bear bad tidings, she would deliver them over the phone.

“William, I’m so sorry. There has been an editorial meeting”—that meant she and Roy had shared the scrapings from the end of a jar of Coffee-mate—“and it has been decided to bring the quiz forward to the next issue. As you may know, we were planning to run it for our readers in midsummer, but now that David has announced his dates, we feel the time has come—”

“What quiz?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, really.” This was even worse than Bill had thought.

“What quiz?” he asked again.

“Well, seeing how many fans of David’s read our magazine, which as you know is the premier publication on the subject—”

“What quiz?”

“The Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz. Two pages, highly specialized, not just for the passing girl in the street. The kinds of things only real fans would know. So Roy and I thought, in fact we pretty much decided, that you have shown such dedication to your work, and already know so much about David, that you would be the obvious—”

“When by?”

“Monday.”

“No.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Can’t be done. All that research …”

“Yes, well, it will mean putting in a little extra work, and we fully realize—”

“I can’t do the weekend.”

“And that,” said Zelda, triumphant in her logic, “is why I am calling you now. So that you can make a really super start on it right away. I shall be working late, too, and so will Peter of the Photographic Department.”

“Late?”

“And I thought, if we’re all done by nine or ten, we could all three pop round the corner to the Odyssey Grill. Company treat, courtesy of Roy. Super squid. Very generous, I think you’ll agree.”

“But this evening was …”

“Was what, dear?” There was a pause. Bill was dumb.

“Well, whatever it was, I’m sure you can do it another time.” Zelda was speaking brightly now, through the worst of it and hurrying to a close. “Thank you so much. Knew we could rely on you. Layout will stop by in just a mo and have a word.”

The phone went dead. Bill put it down. He didn’t know what he dreaded more: calling David Crockett to say he couldn’t make band practice, or eating late-night, badly kebabbed goat with Pete the Pimple. Both had to be done, in any case; to turn down Zelda’s demands, this early in his career at Worldwind, could mean no career at all. A tempting thought, in many ways; but he was saving for a car, and a trip to Greece with Ruth, and though he couldn’t name his future, or give it any form or shape, he knew that he wanted one. Anything but time hanging heavy as iron in his hands.

Bill dug for a handkerchief and blew his nose. He reached for the phone again, but it rang as he touched it. He jumped and snatched it, half in anger.

“Yes, what?”

“Forgive me, William, this is Zelda again. I forgot to add the really important bit. Something to put at the top. If you could, you know, make it a bit splashy. You can do poetic, of all people.”

“Yes?” He found himself crouching forward, as if for a fight.

“Top prize for this quiz of yours.” It was his quiz, already?

“Go on.”

“Well, normally we give away records or posters or tickets and so forth, but on this occasion, what with it being so special, the lucky winner and a friend will get to meet David himself on the set of The Partridge Family.”

“That’s lucky?”

“Come now. Picture yourself as a girl of thirteen. Imagine how thrilled you’d be.”

“I can just imagine.”

Just.