I Think I Love You (6 page)

“
But
isn’t a very sexy word,” I announced that lunchtime, trying to sound as though
sexy
was a word I used every day, although this was the first time I’d tried it out loud. “But in ‘Could It Be Forever,’ David makes
but
sound sexy.”

“David’s got a sexy butt!” shrieked Carol, overjoyed. “Sexy butt, sexy butt!”

Carol was the most advanced of all of us. She had meaty swimmer’s shoulders and a bum that stuck out so far you could balance a paper cup on it. Not only had she started her periods when she was ten, her breasts had developed overnight as though she’d gotten fed up with waiting and used a bike pump. I wouldn’t put it past her, to be honest with you. Carol was on really friendly terms with her breasts. She handled them like they were hamsters, even getting them out occasionally and
petting them. Me, I would hardly dare glance at my own shy swellings in the bathroom mirror at home, not unless it was steamed up.

My nipples were flat and soft and dusky pink like rose petals. Carol’s were closer to walnuts; brown and nubbly, you could see them clearly through her blouse.

“Secondary sexual characteristics,” that’s what the Biology teacher called breasts. And with the blimmin’ boys right there in the same room with us. Thanks a lot, sir. They never let us forget it. SSCs. Secondary sexual characteristics.

Carol’s breasts were hard to ignore because she knotted her white blouse tight under them, even though she was always getting told off by the teachers for showing her stomach, which was the color of gravy browning all year round. Carol’s eyebrows were apricot, so fine they were practically invisible. When the sun shone, the skin underneath looked like bacon, so she drew the arches in with a brown Rimmel pencil. It made her look hard. Harder than she was really. And she had this way of wearing our school tie with a long dangly end so it seemed less like a boring tie and more like a lizard tongue for licking up boys. Carol was sexy, before we even knew what sexy was, is what I’m trying to say.

“Sexy butt! David’s got a sexy butt!” Sharon took up Carol’s chant, delighted by my mistake.

“That’s not what I meant,” I said quickly. “It’s just the way he pauses in the song and leaves you hanging on for the
but …
”

Too late. Even to my own ears I sounded stupidly earnest and pedantic. No-fun Petra. Learn to take a joke, why can’t you?

The others were all falling about. Even Angela and Olga, who had gone to fetch the drinks and the Kit Kats from the machine, and had missed the “sexy but” conversation. Carol’s honking piggy laugh moved into its final snorting stage and hot chocolate shot out of her nose and spattered all down her blouse so she looked like she’d been machine-gunned. My mum would’ve killed me, but Carol couldn’t have cared less. There was something animal about Carol that scared me sometimes.

“Petra wants a feel of David’s sexy butt,” she leered, puckering up her sink-plunger lips and grabbing at my skirt.

I pushed her away. “No, I don’t.”

God, don’t you hate blushing? Once a blush starts you can’t stop it; it goes everywhere, like a spilled glass of Ribena. Obviously, I had noticed David’s backside. You couldn’t very well not notice it, could you? It stuck out of all the photos of his concerts when he wore those slinky catsuits. But I didn’t want to hear David’s bum being joked about. Joking about ordinary boys was one thing, like having a laugh about Mark Tugwell, the double-bass player who sat behind me in county youth orchestra. Tuggy Tugwell. Carol said he kept a spare oboe down his pants, and I couldn’t stop myself looking whenever he uncrossed his legs. But this was different. I was in love. I loathed crude or disrespectful talk about David. I pictured myself riding to his defense in a long cream cheesecloth dress with a high collar, pin tucks on the bodice and frothy lace trim, like the one Karen Carpenter had. I’d be sitting on that palomino pony David is riding in my favorite poster on Sharon’s wall. But I’d be riding sidesaddle like the queen, so I didn’t spoil the dress.

Smutty jokes about David really upset me. I suppose they were an unwelcome reminder that he was common property. Stupid, really. I don’t know how you can get the idea that someone who has the biggest fan club in history, bigger than Elvis’s or the Beatles’, is yours and yours alone, but you can, you really can.

The hard thing was, I loved talking about David, and everything connected to him, even in a silly way. Wednesday nights, I would take the long way round to orchestra practice just so I could walk past David’s, the ironmongers, behind the bus station. Seeing his name written in big letters over the shop felt like a sign. I mean, it
was
a sign, you know, but a different kind of sign. Like the world knew that I loved him and put his name up there special. Just saying his name out loud was a thrill after hearing it a million times inside my own head. Talking about him to friends made him more real, but at the same time it meant I was sharing him, which hurt. I preferred it when we were alone together in my bedroom.

“David is sexy but what?” demanded Gillian, twitching her delicate, Beatrix Potter–bunny nose.

She was in her usual perch on top of the radiator, slender legs dangling down, sheer navy socks pulled up to her thighs, leaving only a few
inches of pale flesh exposed. I tried not to look at the flash of white panties, which made me think of her new boyfriend and of what he might be doing to her. How I longed for those long socks of Gillian’s. My socks came to just below the knee and my mother insisted I wear garters to hold them up. The elastic burrowed into the skin, leaving an angry red bracelet round my calves. It took ages to fade. Sometimes, when I lay in the bath and looked at the marks on my legs, I liked to pretend I was a tortured saint. One who had courageously kept the faith and endured the red-hot irons of sadistic torturers with pointy beards, giving absolutely nothing away.
Stigmata
rhymed with
garter
.

“What’s so funny then about David singing ‘but’? I don’t get it,” Gillian demanded.

God had made Gillian perfect, but in His infinite wisdom He had left out a sense of humor. Maybe if you’re that pretty, He reckons you don’t need one. God probably thinks it’s worth giving a sense of humor only to those of us who have to laugh at all the rubbish bits that are wrong with us.

“It’s not funny,” I said, trying to silence Sharon with a pleading look.

She was supposed to be on my side, not Carol’s. When we were at her house doing our David scrapbooks, I felt we were getting really close, but at school I never quite knew whose friend she was. Sharon’s shifting loyalty stung more than Carol’s crude taunts.

“I was only saying ‘Could It Be Forever’ is David’s best song, like you said, Gillian,” I went on, hoping that saying Gillian’s name would make them stop. They were all scared of upsetting her, even Carol.

Gillian took a pot of Vaseline out of her bag and dabbed a blob on her bottom lip. She had this way of moving the jelly, flexing and rolling both lips to push it along and get even coverage without needing to use her finger. Like all of Gillian’s actions, it was seductive and mesmerizing. We all tried to copy her, but ended up with jelly on our teeth.

Gillian was looking at me as though I were something in a shopwindow she might seriously consider buying. For one brilliant moment I thought she was going to smile. Maybe even invite me round to her house to listen to records. Then she slid off the radiator, yanked down her skirt and said: “That’s the aggravating thing about you, Petra. You’re always agreeing, aren’t you?”

• • •

Our form room was out in one of the temporary classrooms next to the netball court. Better known as the Cowsheds. Freezing in winter, baking hot in summer. Walls so thin you could hear a chair being scraped back in the class next door. They called it the temporary block, but it had been there since the war.

On the way back to afternoon registration, Angela told us she had some news. I could tell from the little secret twitching smile on her face that she’d been saving it up like the last sweet in a packet. Her cousin, a girl called Joanna Crampton who lived in London, had phoned the night before. David was coming over to the United Kingdom to do two concerts at the end of May. It was for definite. Her cousin had read it in the Cassidy mag, which she got a week earlier than us because she lived in Hounslow. Everything took so long to reach South Wales. The whole world could have ended, London could be destroyed by a nuclear bomb and we’d still be stuck in Double Geography for all we knew about it.

The concert was on May 26 at a place called White City.

White. City. It sounded like a beautiful marble palace to me. Like the Taj Mahal maybe. I pictured the glittering paved road leading up to the turreted entrance and the sound of softly trickling fountains. The date was instantly imprinted on my brain like it was my wedding day: May 26.

“They’re saying it’s his last public performance ever,” announced Angela with a quiver of pride.

“He’s not coming again?
Never!
We gotta go then, Petra!” shrieked Sharon, slipping her arm through mine. “David’s gonna be looking for us, mun. We stopped biting our nails and everything. We got four hundred and thirty-nine photos of him and now he’s saying it’s his last concert. There’s gratitude for you!”

It felt so nice to hear our laughs twining round each other, her hiccupy soprano, my scratchy alto. I knew Sharon was sorry about Carol and the sexy
but
.

“If we want tickets,” Angela said, “we’ve got to get a move on and send a postal order. One pound each, it is.”

“I got one of them from my auntie for half a crown,” Sharon said.

“What’s a pound in the old money then?” someone asked.

Olga did the calculation while the rest of us were still counting on our fingers. She had a fantastic head for figures, did Olga.

Before we went decimal, it used to be twelve pennies to the shilling. Three years later and I was still scared of the decimal point. Put it in the wrong place and you could be out by hundreds. My thirteen-year-old brain clung stubbornly to pounds, shillings and pence. I particularly mourned the passing of the threepenny bit, which felt heavy and hot in your hand and had a really satisfying bumpy edge. It was definitely the best coin to play with in your pocket if you were nervous.

“Ach, typical British. Only they would really be counting in twelves in the first place,” my mother said. Evidence of the backwardness of her adopted homeland was one of her favorite things.

Gillian announced that she had twenty-five pounds in post office savings. A small fortune, it made us gasp. Carol said she could nick a load off her dad, who ran the amusement arcade down by the pier and always had a big bag of change.

“So we’ve got a tidy bit already. Problem is, we have to think about the train fare now and the Underground the other end,” Olga said, appointing herself treasurer of the trip, though she didn’t have many rivals for the post.

As the girls added up the money they had, plus the money they thought they could get, I felt panic rising within me, a salty tide that reached the back of my mouth and made me feel my lunch was about to come up. This couldn’t be happening. I’d always felt there’d be plenty of time to see him. Every cell in my body was getting ready for that meeting. He’d wait for as long as it took, I knew. Until the spots across my oily T-zone were gone. Until my breasts were worthy of a proper bra. (Playtex trusted intimate apparel for the Woman You Want to Be. Pink, underwired. Page 78 of the Freemans catalog.) Until I had gotten the Bach cello suites exactly how they were supposed to sound. Pain and joy braided tightly together, like my mother plaiting my hair until my scalp squealed for mercy. Pain and joy, pain and joy. One day, I planned to play my favorite pieces for David. Even if words failed me, music never would.

But now there were no more untils. David’s final concert in Britain was less than a month away. After that, he was never coming back. I’d be like that girl in the play we were doing in English. She never told her love but let concealment like a worm in the bud feed on her cheek. That’s exactly what it felt like. Something gnawing away at your insides. I knew more about David than anybody. All of my preparations could not go to waste.

Somehow, I would get a ticket and go to him at the White City.

There were things my mother didn’t know. My mother didn’t know that she had chosen a really bad name for me, because Petra was also the name of a famous dog on children’s TV. She didn’t know that whenever our teacher called the register and got to me, the whole class started barking, or at least most of the boys did.

My name came next but one to last, so I always had a couple of minutes in which I pretended I was too busy to care about what was coming up. Fitting a new cartridge in my pen, carefully wrapping the old one in blotting paper, searching my satchel under the desk for a sharpener I knew perfectly well was in my brown furry pencil case.

First Mr. Griffiths had to get through the Davieses, including poor Susan Smell, all the Joneses, one Lewis (my Sharon), one Morgan, mad Gareth Roberts, then all the Thomases—

“Karen Thomas?”

“ ’Ere, sir.”

“Karl Thomas?”

“By’ere, sir.”

“Siân Thomas? Susan Thomas?”

There were six Thomases altogether, including two cousins who looked like speckled brown eggs. Their dads were identical twins who took turns working the ham machine down at the Coop wearing nets over their sandy hair so the dandruff didn’t fall in the meat. After the last Thomas, there was a pause that always felt like an eternity in hell to me before …

“Petra Willi—?”

“Woof! Woof! Awooooo.”

“Petra Williams. Quiet! I said, QUIET!”

The class became a kennel. Yapping, snarling, barking. In the back row, Jimmy Lo threw his head back and howled like a wolf under a full moon.

My new friends in Gillian’s group shot me quick, encouraging smiles. The smiles said they were really sorry and embarrassed for me. Mostly, though, I think they were just glad it wasn’t them who had the name of the TV dog.