I Think I Love You (21 page)

“Get off!” we yelled.

Straight ahead, I saw this bald St. John Ambulance man lift one girl above his head like she was a rag doll and post her over the barrier into someone’s arms on the other side. Right then, two security men in black uniforms pushed past me, muscling their way to the stage.

“There’s one of the little bitches over there,” I overheard the bigger guard yell. Really nasty he was. “They’re pretending to faint so they get taken to the front.”

And then He was there. Out of the billowing smoke, he came, like a genie or a god. OhmyGod, David. Oh. My. God. Smiling his David smile and wearing an incredible red suit. David. You’ve never seen anything like it, that long red coat and trousers and a bow tie that sparkled with diamonds. David. And a diamond belt. He looked so unbelievably gorgeous. David. He was laughing and there was some sort of clown dog.
Dayyvvvidd. Dayyy-vvvidddd
.

Sharon started crying she was so happy. I recognized the song first, from the opening bar. “If I Didn’t Care.” And his beautiful soft voice was caressing us, turning our insides liquid. Melting us like a Rolo. Swaying side to side, the girls from South Wales, we sang along, sang better than anyone else in the whole bloody place.

Then the harmonica came in and was so achingly sad that I began to move toward him. It wouldn’t be easy to get to the stage, but I had
no choice, did I? I had to do it. David was lonely, of that I was positive. “I’m coming,” I told him. With me he would not be lonely anymore.

Possessed by that single thought, thirty thousand girls pushed forward toward the love of their life. It was then that I felt Sharon’s hand slip out of mine.

8:36 p.m. Red tails? You could wear red, like a Chelsea pensioner or a Liverpool footballer; you could wear tails, like Fred Astaire; but both together? The only people, until now, who had gotten away with it were circus clowns, pedaling around on tiny bicycles, or else—and Bill couldn’t quite recall how he knew this, but it felt instinctively true—the Devil incarnate.

But that was what the Cassidy guy had decided to wear, on an evening in May. Scarlet tailcoat and matching trousers, with the lapels picked out in rows of rhinestones (or diamonds, as every girl in the place would later insist). His belt glittered with the same gems, and so—God preserve us—did his bow tie. Bill’s gaze kept drifting back to that tie, both dreading and hoping that, in some final farewell to good taste, it would start to spin round, in a giddy flash of gems. What was the whole outfit meant to say? What was the message conveyed by those prim white gloves and the twirling cane: magician, megastar, children’s entertainer, total prick?

Bill stood and watched beside the other journalists, most of them men, none of them Cassidy fans; not in public, at any rate. How surprising it was, then, to see their lips move in sync to half the songs, as if they had been versed in his collected works by the power of hypnotic suggestion. Maybe they couldn’t help it; maybe they just had the radio on all day, in the kitchen at home, beside the draining board, and then on a shelf at the office, next to an open window. Cassidy songs would come and go, through an average radio day, and over the weeks they would seep into your nervous system, whether you wanted them there or not, and you would find yourself breaking out into a song, no more able to prevent it than you would a violent rash.

For a while, it had seemed—to Bill’s relief, and presumably to the fans’ dismay, though they may have been moaning too loudly to let
the music through—that David would not be heard that night. He was onstage all right; he had burst onstage through a billow of white smoke, as if trying to impersonate the sun coming out from behind a cloud. And he had started to sing—singing through a grin, which Bill had always thought was impossible. Noddy Holder of Slade used to have a go, but he ended up looking like one of the witches in
Macbeth
, leering into the mouth of a cauldron. As for a tune, though, who could tell? The PA system at White City was so badly rigged, or the wiring was so amateurish, that all you could hear was buzz: a fearsome, brain-eating hum that burned out of the speakers, with only a faint suggestion of melody veiled somewhere behind. To make matters more infernal, the second song, whatever it was, had incorporated a comedy routine. That is how it must have been described, anyway, on the playlist, although anything less comic would be hard to devise: a dancer dressed as a dog, with whom the star cavorted. “I call him Storm,” he confided to his audience after the idiot had gone. They had roared anyway. Music they couldn’t yet hear, and a piece of funny business with a bloke in a furry suit: to them, it was all revelation. It was all David.

Then, Bill imagined, somebody backstage had rewired a plug or flicked a switch, because, without warning, the voice came alive. “If I didn’t care …” Not a bad voice, either, though it bumped into a croak now and then, and Mrs. Holderness, the choir mistress at Bill’s primary school, would have had something to say about the tuning. (“Up, David, up! We are a kite. We stay aloft with our singing, do we not?”) He was helped by a pair of backing vocalists, pin-sharp pros in slit skirts who never missed a note. They buoyed him up when he went for the highs, and they shimmered as he raced around the stage, and as the yelps of longing came streaming in from the crowd.

“Right little mover, isn’t he?”

Bill glanced to his left, and found a compact, ageless man in a denim shirt, with a beard that looked like a nest. He had shouted to make himself heard, but not quite loud enough.

“Sorry?” Bill shouted back.

“The kid. Look at ’im. Moves well, you’ve got to hand it to him. Watch this bit, he’s going to come to the front in a minute, here we go, and now wait, look what he does with his arse.”

Bill looked, as he was told, and saw the red-clad figure waltz toward them, almost to the brink of the stage. The girls’ cries grew stronger. The figure twirled, one and a half times, then, before setting off upstage, flourished his behind and gave it a slow shake. The two halves of the tailcoat flew apart to frame the gesture. The cries increased threefold, until they sounded like lamentation. Bill felt, more strongly than ever, that he was in the wrong place here: the wrong game, the wrong profession. Certainly the wrong body.

“Tart,” shouted the man beside him. Bill frowned back.

“Who?”

“Him. It’s such an act. Putting it out there for the girlies. ’Slike watching a stripper.”

“A what?”

“A stripper.”

And he was right. If Bill had had Zelda there, or even Roy, he could have pointed at the stage and shown them the reason for their work, the thing that paid their wages every month. It wasn’t just the songs; sometimes it was hardly the songs at all. It wasn’t the dance. It was the act. Not a put-on, or a fraud. He was an actor, wasn’t he? That was where this whole palaver had started, on TV with
The Partridge Family
, and now it had spun off and grown, only this time he wasn’t pretending to be someone else. He was pretending to be David Cassidy. And, you had to hand it to the sonofabitch, he was bloody good at it.

The light in the sky above had started to fail. As if in reply, the lights in the stadium came on, flooding the long, deep bowl of mass humanity. Bill looked round, away from the stage. He was close to the barrier now, the one he had come round; somewhere beyond it was the disappointed girl with the autograph book. Everyone lifted their faces to the brightness, which swept across them and reached its destination—the small man onstage, slender as a quill, trapped now in a blinding aura.

Only this time, the kid in the spotlight, no fool, was doing something new. He had the cunning, Bill understood, that every artist needs a drop of, however low his art; the salesmanship passed off as innovation. The kid would give them the song because they knew and adored it, but he wouldn’t simply perform it; he’d play with it, spice it up just
enough to gull the girls into believing that they were tasting it for the first time.

“
Breakin’ up is hard to do-ooo …
” It came out at half the speed, the star strumming softly on the guitar around his neck, lending the lyrics a kick of proper sadness, and the drummer holding back the brisk snap that the girls would have heard on the record, using a brush instead. “Nice,” said the hairy man at Bill’s elbow. “Clever little bugger.”

The girls behind Bill reacted to the unfamiliar speed as if a wire brush were running, ever so gently, along their spines. What had he himself written, in David’s voice, two issues ago? “Y’know when you hear a slow one, and it gives you the shivers? Well, allow me to let you into a little secret. It’s the same when you SING it. True! I can be up there, holding the mike, and I get that kinda feeling myself. If you’ve ever held anyone close, on a dance floor, you’ll know just what I mean!” Which, Bill had privately thought, was as good a way as any of writing about a smooch without actually saying the word. Pete the Pimple called it “slow fuck stuff,” as if he knew what he was talking about. He would have given a filthy grimace if he had been here right now, with Bill, and heard the sobbing and the crying out.

But something was wrong with the sobs.

There is the pain of emotions that you can’t hope to master, whose strength and meaning you hardly grasp, gusting around inside you on a Sunday night, with a song in your heart; and then there is pain, the real thing, as plain as a needle. And Bill, listening through the din, could no longer be certain which was which. His stomach lurched. “What’s your name?” he said to the hairy man. “Jerry. From
Rock On.
” Why did that matter? “Come with me,” said Bill, turning round and pulling him along. They beat a path through four or five rows of journalists, all of them facing the singer, and all annoyed at being bustled or shoved aside, telling Bill to fucking watch it. And then he and Jerry were in the clear, at the back, looking straight at the barrier.

“Jesus Christ.”

The first thing he noticed, without knowing why, was the woman in white. Not a girl, a woman, definitely, early twenties perhaps, same age as him, though she had tried to dress younger, like someone playing an angel in a school play: white gym shoes with white laces, white
jeans, white T-shirt with a screenprint of Cassidy across her chest. The only unwhite thing about her was the face. Even in the shadow of the floodlights he could see that. It was pressed against the bars, but not in eagerness, and it was red. Purple red, like a plum, as if the breath were being squeezed out of her.

All the way along, it was the same. The crush of the people behind, unchecked, with nowhere to go, nowhere to be siphoned off, no direction except straight ahead, toward the source of their joy: the crush was piling up, wave upon wave of pressure, and the people at the barrier were taking the brunt. One girl in green was almost horizontal; she must have crawled sideways to find an easier space and gotten stuck. Some girls had their backs to the bars, as if they had turned round and tried hopelessly to flee. Most girls were crying, but the noise just got sucked into the general cry and lost. Nobody more than twenty yards away would have a clue what was going on. David would know nothing, not yet.

“Help me. I’ve lost my friend.”

Bill looked to his right and saw a slender dark girl, close to the top of the barrier, one leg over it. If she could climb into the press enclosure, she would be safe. One of her shoes had already fallen onto his side. He forced his way toward her, started to scale the bars, ready to reach out and grab her hand, sensing the press of bodies inches away on the other side of the cage. He heard pleading as he climbed, but also, even now, voices yelling, “Out the way,” “I can’t see.” Behind him, David went on singing. “
Re-member whe-e-en you held me tight …
”

He got to the girl and clumsily took her in his arms. “Help, please,” she sobbed. “It’s my friend. Please, you’ve got to help us.”

Before Bill could pull her to safety, he was plucked off the barrier and landed badly. He felt something give in his back, a muscle tearing just below his ribs.

“What you doing?” It was a security guard, bored and burly. His white shirt was stained with sweat.

“What the hell are
you
doing?” Bill replied.

“Come on, sir, don’t give us any trouble. You lot’re supposed to be the sensible ones. We’ve got enough trouble with the loonies in there.” He jerked his head at the crowd.

“They’re going to die.”

“Come again?”

“They can’t breathe, the ones at the front. They’re being suffocated. Look at them.”

“Bit hot.”

“What?”

“I’ll get some water. Got a bucket over there.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Bill watched the big man amble away, then turned back to the bars. He saw a very small girl, her face contorted, and her mouth opened wide, soundless with shock, as the crowd behind her gave another heave. One of her arms was bending the wrong way. Another heave. It was like a monster, wallowing and thrashing. Why now? Then Bill realized. David had finished his song. They were cheering, and weeping, and sending him their love. Their undying love.

8:59 p.m. The water hit us girls in the face. Some of the crowd had been begging for water and this was what we got. A bucket chucked at us by a security guard. Then another. I was really angry, you know. I kept thinking of a zoo, only the keepers weren’t taking care of the animals. Hundreds of girls were squashed against the barrier now and no one would open it to let us through. I’d already lost a shoe trying to climb over to ask for help. One of the Judas burgundy-brown platforms Gillian had given me. This lovely-looking man heard me screaming and sort of caught me in his arms, but he’d been pulled off by one of the nasty security people.

In the distance, I could hear David still singing.

Why didn’t someone
tell
him, for God’s sake? If David knew what was happening to us, he would stop the concert and come and help. Where was Sharon? That was all I cared about now. Sick with panic, I scanned the crush of girls, but Sha’s fair head was nowhere to be seen. It must mean she was somewhere on the floor. I screamed this terrible thought at Carol, who simply nodded. Carol’s life had been so full of disasters, big and small, that this one couldn’t take her by surprise. She knew what the worst was, which made her tougher than someone that
young should be, but it also gave her the belief that you could get out the other end.