I Think I Love You (20 page)

And, needless to say, he was the only male. This Lilliput was a female community, in which men, with one exception, were neither welcome nor required. Far away, Bill had seen, or believed he had seen, the bald, bespectacled head of a St. John Ambulance man, who seemed to have lost his cap, his cool and his bearings all at once; but even he had vanished into the throng, perhaps for good. Poor bloke. Most days he gathered up riders with cracked collarbones at point-to-points, or poured fresh water down the throats of cross-country runners; nothing
in his experience, or his gentle faith, could have prepared him for thirty-five thousand teenaged girls, raging like bees in the hive of White City on a Sunday night. Christ, the din.

Bill had made a mistake, and he was paying for it already. “Get down there among the little girlies,” Roy had said, rubbing his hands unpleasantly. “You know, get there early, pack a meal, take a tent, lots of fresh water, pith helmet. Dig yourself in and ask them what they’re doing there.”

“They’re coming to see their favorite pop star,” Bill had replied, nonplussed.

“I
know
that, wanker. But go and ask them to their little faces, see what nonsense they come out with. Take one of them machines to measure sound, what’s it called? Dumb-bell level?”

“Decibels.”

“That’s the one. See if you can get a reading on their screams. We could run a little bar chart, give a prize to the loudest, that sort of malarkey. Howlin’ Hannah from Harpenden. Sharon the Shouty.”

“But I thought there was a press enclosure.”

“There is, if you’re a poof.” Roy had given him the same look he gave anyone who wore a seat belt in a car.

“But it’s nearer the stage,” Bill had gone on, prolonging an argument that could not be won.

“So what? So you can see up his purple shorts? Look, matey, we don’t often get a chance to see our readers in the flesh, so for God’s sake go and press it. Have a squeeze and report back to me. Arright?”

Bill had obeyed, in part. He had gotten hold of a press ticket, after no more than nine phone calls to the promoter’s office. It would mean being penned in, he suspected, like a monkey, behind some sort of cage, although his even stronger suspicion was that the human activity outside would be the most animal of all. The girls would go ape, and he would end up grateful for the iron bars. On the other hand, he would, for a while, do the bidding of his boss; get there well ahead of the show, mix with them as the mood grew, get some quotes, then make his way to the safe haven of his fellow journalists before the main event. The trick was to time it right.

An elbow caught him under the ribs and knocked the wind out of
him. He keeled forward, catching his jaw on the head of the girl in front.

“Hey,” she said, twisting half round, “watch it, okay?” She had short hair and glasses, and for a second Bill thought, with an odd pang of fellow feeling, that she was a boy. But what would a boy be doing here wearing a David Cassidy scarf?

“Sorry,” Bill said, or tried to say. He was still fighting to get his breath back, and the word came out as
zerr
.

The girl had a friend with her, who giggled. She was round and pink-faced, in a yellow sweater.

“What you doing here, anyway?”

“Erm, writing. I’m a writer.”

“What, like poems?”

“No, I write for magazines,” Bill said, dropping easily and untruthfully into the plural. The sound of chatter and hum, on every side, was deafening, but the three of them were squashed so tight that they could practically talk straight into one another’s ears. Bill bent his head to their level.

“D’you do pop?” the round girl asked.

He coughed, still wheezing slightly. “Um-hum, I cover quite a lot of the music scene, actually. Rock, jazz. A little bit of pop.”

“D’you do interviews?”

“Sometimes. If the editor thinks I should.”

“Is that what you’re doing here, then?”

“I suppose so.”

“So why are we the ones asking all the questions?”

Bill had no answer to that. He saved face, as he often did, by raising the level of his lies.

“Well, sometimes doing an interview, it isn’t just a matter of Q and A, you know. It’s like, like, a conversation. Like you’d have with a friend …” The girls were screwing up their faces. Only fifteen or so, but they could smell nonsense when it came their way; they could certainly rumble a boy—or, in this case, a grown-up—who was trying too hard.

The other girl suddenly spoke, the one whose head he had bumped into. One arm of her glasses was mended with masking tape.

“You haven’t done David, have you?”

There was a pause. The crowd ebbed and surged around them, with Bill stuck there like a lighthouse. The sensible thing, of course, was to deny everything, to brush the whole question aside; who knew how these girls would react if he told them anything else? It wouldn’t just be vain to say he had met the man; it might be dangerous.

“Three days ago,” he said.

He didn’t know that human beings could explode. He knew that they could shout, howl, hurl their wrath against the heavens; he knew that some people, once they start laughing or wailing, find it impossible to stop; but this was different. This was like a land mine. The girls flung their hands to the sides of their heads, as if trying to stop their skulls from bursting wide; they stared at him in what might, from a distance, have looked like horror; and they screamed. Christ, did they scream. All that breath, in those still-unfinished lungs …

“Oh my God, oh my Gaaaahhdd!” Other girls skewed round and looked at them, then at Bill, feeling the heat of the mania as it spread. He was already regretting having spoken. That would teach him for telling the truth.

“This bloke met
Day-vid,
” cried the girl in the yellow sweater. Instantly the gabble doubled its strength, poured in his direction.

“What was it like what was he wearing did he have his guitar did he smell nice did he have snacks were they American ones did he have Twinkles they’re called Twinkies you dozy cow was he wearing jewelry did he have a necklace on any rings please don’t tell us he had rings …”

Bill was backing away, but they pawed at him—not at him, he was no more than a vessel, but it felt as though they wanted to scrape off any residue of David that might have clung to him. Half a thumbprint would do. One girl with braids reached out and clamped a palm against his, saying, “If I shake your hand, and you shook his …” Then she took her hand away and held it tenderly against her cheek. Another had an autograph book open and was holding out a pen, with a rubbery “Love Is” figure stuck on the end. No one had ever asked him for an autograph when he played for Spirit Level, that was for sure, though some pub landlords would make him sign for drinks before the gig, so that none of the band tried to sneak any pints for free.

Bill looked around, just to check that nobody he had ever known, loved, worked for, spoken to, lived with or slept with was in sight. But all he could see were the heads and shoulders of juvenile strangers, so he turned back, took the pen and quickly signed his name on the yellow page, using what he hoped was the kind of wild flourish that you would get from a rock star, or from someone who had met a rock star, once. The braids girl took back the book and looked at the scrawl, then up at Bill.

“What’s your name?”

“Bill.”

“Doesn’t look like Bill. Looks like number eighty-seven.” The girl next to her peered at it, too. “Written by a spaz,” she added helpfully.

Bill gave a weak smile, the smile that drinkers give just before they begin to throw up and withdraw from the scene. Somewhere there was a barrier, the obvious frontier point, which divided the press corps from the fans, but to find it would mean charging forward, head down; the better option was the more illogical one—to reverse through the ranks, exit through the entrance and make his way round the outside of the stadium to another gate. Bill chose the second route and ceased to struggle. Instead, he took a long breath, let himself fall backward into the throng and kept on falling. Bodies kept him upright, more or less, and momentum kept him going. Somewhere music struck up, urgent and voiceless. Somebody gave him a hug and passed him on. Sometimes you can save yourself by drowning.

8:11 p.m. “Excuse me, that’s my head. Excuse me, please get off me, please.”

I was used to rough handling from my mother, but this was the first time I’d been used as a stepladder. A girl with long red hair had one boot wedged in my cheek, the other was blocking my ear, which I barely noticed anyway because I couldn’t hear anything, the screaming was that loud. I tried to shake the girl off, but there was no room to shake in. I could barely move my body an inch either way, so I tried to rear up backward and unseat my passenger, like I’d seen the horses do on Mam and Tad’s farm. The girl dug in her heels and stood upright
on the shoulders that, until a short while ago, had belonged to me and me alone.

“David, I want your baby,” the stranger on my shoulders wailed, swaying from side to side.

“Geroff, you dirty bitch,” Carol said, punching the redhead in the backside, which sent her flying off me and headfirst over the girls in front of us. She didn’t fall because there wasn’t anywhere to fall to; instead we watched as she was borne away like a surfer on the wave that was surging toward the stage.

Many times on the beach at home, I had felt the full force of the tide. I knew what it was like to be swimming along in the shallows and to suddenly find yourself picked up and hurled onto the pebbles, to feel every bone in your body jolted and to try to claw and scramble your way up the stones, away from the water’s jealous grip. But this was another kind of power altogether. It was like being held in a vise. It suddenly felt like Petra Williams, David Cassidy fan aged thirteen and three-quarters of South Wales, was no more. I was a single droplet in a sea of fans and the only way to survive was to go with the flow, which was currently forcing all of us forward up against a barrier. Sharon was clinging to my arm, her eyes shining with excitement, her mouth fixed in a permanent O of amazement.

I expect you’d be surprised to hear we were talking. The terrible scene on the train was still so close and it had put a wedge between us, but now the crush in the arena had thrown us together once more. Sharon couldn’t have kept a sulky distance if she’d tried. We had never been closer, or farther apart. On the other side of the barrier, which was about twenty feet away, I could see a couple of photographers who were taking pictures of us and the vast crowd of girls. One man with a beard was laughing and pointing at us, like we were animals in a zoo or something.

The frightening thought was that David hadn’t even appeared yet. On the stage was a support band, with some blond girl singing the blues. She was good, the girl was, but the sound system was terrible, all buzzy, and the screams drowned her voice out anyway. I felt sorry for her.

Tonight was all about coming to see Him, to get as near to David
as possible. How I had yearned for this moment. For eighteen months, David had colonized my brain until it didn’t feel like my thoughts were my own anymore, yet all I could think was, thank God I’d been to the toilet and changed my pad before we came through the gate. I didn’t want to have an accident. There was no way of getting out now, or in the near future. Olga and Angela, and Ange’s cousin Joanna, had struck out for the dirty bathrooms at the back about an hour ago, and there was still no sign of them.

“IS THAT HIM?” Sharon was shouting and pointing at the stage.

I read her lips.

“NO. HE’LL BE HERE NOW, ANY MINUTE.”

Gillian was holding the other end of Sharon’s
DAVID CASSIDY
scarf, and the pair of them shifted from foot to foot so the scarf rippled like a flag. I didn’t want to wave my scarf. I thought it might be unladylike, which was something David disliked in a girl. He would prefer us to listen respectfully to his songs instead of bawling our silly heads off. Gillian refused to look at me and I was avoiding her anyway. The journey to London had not been forgiven, nor would it be, by either side, but it was temporarily forgotten because, here among the swarming thousands, we Welsh girls were all each other had. Finding herself surrounded by a foreign foe, Carol was doing what all famous Welsh bruisers did on away matches: she was furiously tackling to the ground any rivals who dared to invade our square foot of space.

When we first arrived, we had found our way to some seats on the terrace, although they were no longer seats by the time we got to them. Everyone was on their feet. I mean everyone. If you tried to sit down you’d be in trouble. Honest to God, standing up was hard enough. Other girls raced past us, down the steps and into the big grass patch in the middle of the arena, and we belted after them, determined not to let any of the others have a better chance of touching David.

Standing there in the middle of that huge space, I looked around in astonishment. I didn’t know that love had slain so many. Of course, I understood that David had millions of fans, but you could generally put them out of your mind. Not today. Before, it had always been just him and me. Now it was him and us. So many of us, as far as the eye could see.

Outside, in the queue for merchandise, I’d got talking to this tiny blond girl in a thin gray anorak. Moira. She had hitched by herself all the way down from Dundee, and she didn’t even have a place to stay. I was in awe of her courage. Slept on a bench outside the Skyway Hotel, where everyone thought David was staying. Moira said the merchandise was a total rip-off, and it was, but I handed over Dad’s tenner anyway for a two-quid T-shirt with a picture of David wearing that denim jacket I had always loved him in. I desperately needed proof I’d been there, that this wasn’t just another daydream.

“We want David! We want David!” We all joined in the chant that filled White City. We were impatient now. Thirty thousand pairs of impatient platform shoes sounded like stampeding hooves.

“You’re just great, a lovely audience, thank you so much,” the blond blues singer’s voice crackled over the sound system.