I Think I Love You (11 page)

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:

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.

“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.”