I Think I Love You (32 page)

In the big, ranch-style kitchen, with its breakfast bar and high stools, Petra admired the pictures on the walls while Sharon made tea for them. The prints appeared to be Japanese until Petra found her glasses and saw that they were watercolors on a kind of parchment, depicting views that she knew like the back of her own hand.

“These are incredible, Sha,” Petra said. “That’s Three Cliffs Bay. You could walk straight into those waves and swim.”

“Went up to London. Saw that big Hokusai show at the Royal Academy.
Beautiful
. Got me into calligraphy. Working with very fine brushes. Bloody mess at first, but I’m getting the hang of it now. Did my City and Guilds art foundation. Degree next. Bit more time now the boys are settled in school. Bachelor of Arts not housewife, I am. You’ll be proud to know me one day, Petra.”

Petra felt a jolt of surprise that Sharon had done something like going to the Hokusai show without someone like her. Instantly, she rebuked herself. Christ, that was exactly the kind of patronizing attitude Marcus had infected her with, describing Sharon as a “colorful character” like she was something that came on in Shakespeare to keep the groundlings happy while the important tragic actors changed costume for their next big scene. Petra knew why she was there now. Not just because she needed company for her journey into the past to meet David. She was there to say sorry to Sha, to apologize for the missing years, for becoming the kind of woman who thought of Sharon Lewis as light relief.

“There’s lovely you’re looking,” said Sharon, placing her hand on top of Petra’s and letting it rest there. “From what you said, after Marcus finished with you, I thought you’d be a wreck, mun.”

All those years in London, Petra had thought of herself as the sweet
Welsh girl, the innocent abroad. “Little me from the Valleys in the big bad city”—that was her shtick among her new circle of friends, who had taught her words like
shtick
. But it wasn’t she who was lovely. It was Sharon. That kind of sweetness was lost to her forever; Marcus had been her teacher in jaded worldliness and she had been a talented pupil.

“What d’you mean, emotionally he’s still with you?” Sharon demanded. “He’s shacked up on a boat with his fancy woman. Sometimes, for a clever woman, you’re bloody
twp
, you are, Petra. Honest to God. Bloody bastard,” she added, with as much malice as she would ever manage.

It was so hot they got in the car and drove to the beach. Sha put some sandwiches in a Tupperware container and they bought a big bag of Quavers at the petrol station, and a bottle of dandelion and burdock.

“I didn’t think they still made this,” Petra said.

“They don’t. It’s been out back since 1977. Land that time forgot, down ’ere. Hope you packed your own taramasalata.”

They were the only ones there, apart from a Jack Russell who barked at each incoming wave, greeting it with a darting fury, like a small and very indignant referee. After they had discussed how Quavers dissolved on your tongue, Sharon got down to the serious business of looking for pebbles.

“Apart from David and Steven Williams and Marcus, what men have you loved, Pet?”

Petra lay back and pressed herself into the stones, enjoying the way the warmth seeped into her bones through her clothes. “Andrew Marvell. Romantic, witty, brilliant foreplay. Incredible insight into what makes women tick.”

“Sounds fabulous. What was wrong with him, then? Married, was he?”

“Died in 1678. Poet. Also Member of Parliament for Hull.”

“A
dead poet
?” Sharon gave a cackle of disbelief.

“The only kind you can trust,” said Petra firmly. “You don’t want to let a live poet near you. They’re like locusts. Strip you of everything you ever felt, then use you for material in their sensitive first-person narratives.”

“Nice. And who else?”

Petra thought for a bit. “The dark one in
Alias Smith and Jones
. Pete Duel. Always had a thing for him. Most gorgeous smile in history. Remember we used to watch it on your TV after you got color for the Olympics?”

“Nineteen seventy-two,” Sharon confirmed. “He topped himself, didn’t he? Rest in peace, Pete Duel. Honest, Petra, I know you go for emotionally unavailable blokes, but alive would be a start.”

“I don’t want to start,” Petra said. “That’s over for me.”

“What? Love, over?” Sharon pressed a pebble into her friend’s palm. Petra opened her eyes. It was the palest greeny-blue speckled with black dots.

“Perfect. You always found the best ones. Plenty more pebbles on the beach. I couldn’t, you know. I just couldn’t bear to tell my story to someone else ever again. The
effort
of telling my story to a stranger.” She sat up and shook her hair. “Hey, we could advertise instead. ‘Damaged romantic Welshwoman, cellist, one careless owner seeks …’ ”

She was crying by then and her head was on Sharon’s shoulder.

“It’s all right, you know,” Sharon said. “It’s gonna be all right. We’re gonna go to Vegas and meet David and he’ll marry us both like one of those Morons—”

“Mormons, Sha,” said Petra, laughing tears and crying laughter. “
Mormons.
”

Back at the house, Sharon opened a bottle of wine, poured them a large glass each and got on with the boys’ dinner, quickly peeling the potatoes and cutting them into chips, while the two of them talked through travel arrangements and—far more important—what on earth each of them, come the great day, would wear.

“Retro, like,” said Sharon firmly. “Flares. Poncho. Just to freak David out. Like he just went through a time warp.”

“Well,” said Petra, “it’s a thought. But, look—” Here inspiration struck. “No bra, mind. Nobody did in nineteen seventy—”

“Oh my
God.
” Sharon cupped her bosom in both hands. “Are you joking? Two kids and twenty years later? Imagine this lot swinging around in front of the poor bloke. He’d be trying to shake hands with them.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’d get them through customs,” Petra said. “American security is very picky these days, anything that looks like it could be an offensive weapon.”

“All right for you, mun. Little Miss Pert. Look at them, all present and correct. Look at
you
. You’re exactly the same shape as you were when that Steven Williams got it bad for you—”

“He did
not …
” Petra found herself blushing. For her, the unearthing of the past was part agony, part archaeology: so much effort, and unease, and so little pleasure for your pains. So much turning to dust. Whereas for Sharon it was a trove, to be opened up and talked over, regrets all mingled with joyful recollections, everything up for grabs.

As if in answer to these buried thoughts, Sharon suddenly stopped in midconversation and put down her glass. “My treasure box,” she said. “I’m mad, me.” And with that she hurried up the stairs. She was gone quite a while. There were clatterings, a silence, two thumps and a string of Welsh oaths. Then she returned, arms laden with a cardboard box. The tape that held the lid down was wrinkled and dark brown, and had long since lost its power to stick. Sharon yanked it off and opened the box.

Inside was their archive, or its edited highlights: posters, postcards, flyers, newspaper cuttings, magazines.
The Essential David Cassidy Magazine
, stacks of it, held together with rubber bands that had hardened and cracked, or not held together at all. There were scrapbooks, the glue evaporated, the cuttings coming loose like snakeskin.

My God. That face. Petra was astonished. The eyes, with their heavy lashes. The parted lips. A face she had gazed at daily and longed to kiss. Even now, she knew that face better than she knew any of the world’s great paintings.

“Hullo, lovely boy,” said Sharon, greeting a poster of David on a horse. “Look at him, Pet. Gorgeous, wasn’t he? How old must he be now, then?”

“Twenty-four,” Petra said immediately.

“No, he was twenty-four
then
. Then’s not the same as now, is it? So, how old are we? Ancient, we are. So he’s eleven years older than us. When’s his birthday, then?”

“April twelfth,” Petra replied without missing a beat.

She hadn’t thought of David at all. Not once, not until that moment. It hadn’t been about him. All of a sudden, the idea that they were about to journey back to meet him—travel through time, not just cross the Atlantic—seemed improbably strange. If the David she had loved was still twenty-four, but David Cassidy was now a middle-aged man, how old did that make the Petra who was heading for Las Vegas?

She thought of the thirteen-year-old girl—“Gillian Edwards’s little friend,” that’s what Gwennie the grocer had called her—who had filled in the Ultimate David Cassidy Quiz, tracking down every answer as though in pursuit of the Holy Grail. And the prize didn’t belong to Petra now, that was the thing. It belonged to the child she had been. And Petra had wanted her to have it. She wished she could give it to her: sneak past her mother keeping guard by the marble pastry slab in the kitchen, creep up the stairs and into that cold bedroom with the hard single bed and the brown counterpane and say, “Here it is, darling. You won.”

How could Petra and Sharon, with their children, their adult bodies, their buried parents and their marriages, healthy and wrecked—how could they go and see David? It was impossible, she saw that now. The David Cassidy she had loved would not be there, and neither would the girl who had loved him.

“So, d’you think our hotel room will have a jacuzzi, then, Pet? It’s America, so bound to, isn’t it?
Petra?
”

“Sorry. Miles away.”

“You’re telling me. I looked it up in Mal’s atlas. It’s in the middle of a bloody desert. You basically fly over sand for a while and then you look down, right, and there’s David Cassidy, standing there waving up at you. Like an oasis.” Not a word they had much use for in Wales. The way Sharon said it, the vowels took about half a minute to come out.

“Typical,” said Petra.

“What’s that, then?”

“Well, you just said I went after emotionally unavailable men.”

“No, I didn’t mean that.”

“Well,” Petra sighed, “I mean, you can’t get more emotionally unavailable than a pop star who lives five thousand miles away.
And
you’ve got thirty million rivals for him.”

“ ’S true,” said Sharon. “But, you know, maybe it was better that way.” She paused, hearing an echo in her own words. Then she began to sing. Without any warning, Petra found herself sitting drinking wine with a George Michael impersonator. Sharon stopped and took another sip. “Love a bit of George. No offense to David, mind.”

“None taken, I’m sure,” said Petra, wondering, for the thousandth time, at her friend’s ability to go with the flow of her own thoughts and see where they led. Had that been the secret of happiness, all along? Sing when you feel like it?

“Tell you what, though,” said Sharon, skipping back to the past. “If David had gotten off that horse and climbed down out of the poster into our bedrooms and made himself emotionally available, what would we have done, eh? We wouldn’t have shagged him, would we? We’d never
kissed
anyone, mun.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Petra. “I would have played him my cello. I had a bit I’d practiced for him specially. He’d have been blown away, I’m sure.”

“From what I heard, he was keen on a bit of blowin’ away,” said Sharon, with her witchiest cackle. “Funny thing is,” she went on, “I never did meet David, ’cept at White City, when he was half a mile away. But I still remember him a lot better than most of the boys I did, you know, know. I mean, just cos he wasn’t available didn’t mean he wasn’t
there
. Right?”

“Right,” said Petra. She felt light in the head, with laughter bubbling up, as if the absurdity of the whole thing—this plight, this opportunity, this old joke—was only now starting to strike home. She knew that her obsession with David had been strange, unbalanced; a sign there was something missing in her childhood. Molly loved Leonardo DiCaprio, but not in the desperate, all-consuming way that Petra at the same age had longed for David. Molly was happier, that was it. There was more in her life. Her need was not so great.

“Well, then,” Petra said, pretending to be decisive, “since Mr. Cassidy wouldn’t come to us, we’re going to go to him, aren’t we now?”

“Bit late, d’you think?” asked Sharon, in a rare flicker of doubt. “Look at me, Pet. I’m past it.”

“Come on, you’re gorgeous,” Petra replied. “Anyway, you know what they say. Forty’s the new thirty.”

Sharon made a face. “Try telling that to my backside.”

What do you wear for a makeover? Petra had decided to put on her patterned skirt and the black linen jacket she had bought for her mum’s funeral, over a black camisole top. Black sandals. Around her neck was the fine, gold Wright & Teague pendant that Marcus had bought her for Christmas, with matching studs. Seeing it glint, she wondered how much guilt had contributed to the purchase. Assessing herself in the hall mirror before she left the house, Petra noticed that the shoes, fashionable two years before, looked a bit scuffed these days. Too late to do anything about it. She felt like one of those women who dashes around tidying the house before their cleaner arrives. You didn’t want to arrive for a makeover looking like a wreck; on the other hand, you didn’t want to primp and prettify yourself too much, in case the “After” photo looked worse than the “Before.”

Years of comparing herself with her mother had led Petra to nurture what the magazines identified as poor body image. She probably didn’t look too bad for her age, and divorce was turning out to be the best diet ever invented. Still, when it came to beauty, her mother had set the standard. All her life, Petra would identify with the plain daughters of beautiful women. What did it feel like to be one of those poor girls born to a supermodel mother and a beaky rock-star dad? The rock stars always left a trail of chinless, beaky daughters behind them. Girls doomed to live in the shadow of their refulgently lovely mothers. Petra sometimes wondered if those mothers found it hard, as her mother had clearly found it hard, not to have given birth to a girl in their own image.