I Think I Love You (43 page)

Now it was Petra’s turn to smile. “Well, of course I was dreading it. I couldn’t bear to feel sorry for him. I didn’t want all those women to look at him and feel disappointed. I was sort of cringing for him, you know. And then he came on and started singing, before you turned up, and everything just sort of fell into place. How can I—”

“Be sure?”

“Watch it. No, it’s just that he … he both was and wasn’t him. The voice is there, even if he does look older, still pretty fantastic, though. That beautiful smile. But the aura or whatever you call it, that’s gone.”

“But
you
made the aura, not him,” said Bill. “That was
your
job, back in 1974. I did the fake version on the magazine, but you did the real thing. You told a story to yourself, about a boy you all loved, and you did it so brilliantly, with all your heart, that it didn’t matter whether it came true. It just
felt
true.” Bill drank from the water bottle and passed it back to her. She took a swig. “Sorry, I’m putting it badly,” Bill went on.

“No, that’s better than I could ever do,” said Petra. “That’s why, when I saw him tonight, I didn’t feel like crumpling, I didn’t feel stupid or disappointed. I really loved hearing the songs again, and David seemed pretty, you know, balanced, considering—”

“That’s what I thought.”

“—but I just said to myself, well, young Petra, the story’s over, girl. And the funny thing was, I didn’t
mind.
”

“What a swell story it is.”

“Yes.” Petra repeated the line, hearing the faint echo of a tune her dad had sung all those years ago. “Sinatra.”

“Ah. Now
there
, excuse me, is a
real
star. That is who I came to Las Vegas to see.”

“He’s not here?”

“God, no. Dead, but immortal. But just imagine, to have been here when he
was
. You could have come dressed like Ava Gardner.”

“The bargain-basement Welsh version.”

“Not at all. The spitting image.”

“And what would you have come as?”

“Oh, a very unsuccessful mobster. Machine gun jammed. Losing all my money in minutes.”

“Not the Boss?”

“Not the Boss.”

Petra looked round, at the door of Harrah’s.

“Talking of losing money, where’s Sha?”

“Shall I go and see?” Bill asked.

“No, because then we’ll be split up, and it’ll be a disaster. Give her three more minutes, and then we’ll go back in together.”

“They do have a separate karaoke bar in there, you know.”

“Oh God.”

“She’s probably doing ‘I Am a Clown’ right now.”

“In clown makeup. If there’s any of my friends who can get hold of a red nose at midnight in a foreign country, it’s her.”

“Is it midnight? Jesus. What’s the time in England right now?”

Petra looked at her watch. “Seven in the morning.”

“That means I have been up for exactly twenty-four hours. Bed, I think.”

“I think so.”

There was a pause. Bill, as he often did when confounded, took refuge in mock formality.

“Anyway, my dear, thank you for a most enjoyable evening.” He gave her a gentlemanly nod.

“And you, sir. It was most pleasant.”

Bill looked at her, and said: “Back at the Grand, when you were watching him. David. When you said that thing about it being both him and not him …”

“Sorry, it sounds rubbish.”

“No, it makes perfect sense. In its rubbish way.” She laughed. “And what I want to know
is,
” he went on, “was it the same for you? Did you feel like Petra One and Petra Two, you know, before and after? What did the screaming teenager have to say to this lovely, perfect, grown-up cello therapist with a tiny bit of strawberry ice cream on her cheek?”

Petra put a hand to her face.

Bill said, “Come on, who is this I’m looking at right now—you or not you?”

Petra, for once in her life, had no doubt.

“Oh, it’s me all right,” she replied. “Just the one of me.”

Bill leaned toward her. She breathed in and closed her eyes.

There was an almighty sound. A roar went down the Strip.

“Oh
please,
” said Bill, and put his head on her shoulder. Opposite, the volcano had exploded outside the Mirage. Smoke and fire burst from the crater. False lava flowed down the flanks.

Bill and Petra leaned together and laughed, and hoped they would never stop.

“Bloody
hell!
” It was Sharon, who had herself erupted from the doors of Harrah’s. She was carrying a bunch of flowers in one hand and a poker chip in the other. “
Fireworks.
”

W
hen Petra and Sharon were thirteen, they made a promise. If they were still unmarried when they were old and on the shelf—twenty-nine or thirty, say—they would move in together. So that they would never be alone.

“Like those two ladies of Llangollen,” Sharon said. She was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, doing her eyes. After all these years, she still had a soft spot for blue mascara.

“I used to think it was common until I saw Lady Diana wearing it. D’you think Diana read
Jackie
on how to open out your eyes with blue mascara?”

“Course she did,” said Petra.

“Even posh girls?”

“All girls.” Petra tucked her shirt back into her skirt, having experimented with wearing it hanging loose. In twenty minutes they would meet David, and the girls—the women—were keen to make the right impression.

“Gorgeous blouse,” Sharon said.

“My mother’s. Must be twenty years old. Hasn’t dated, has it?” She had decided to wear Greta’s white silk blouse and her pearls. It felt right. In the weeks since she found the letter from
The Essential David Cassidy Magazine
in the wardrobe, her attitude toward her mother had altered. She was no longer angry with her. Like many mothers of her generation, Greta had a harshness that already felt as though it belonged to a lost, more brutal age. It was as if particles of steel, floating in the air of their Welsh town, had entered her bloodstream. Greta had been trying to prepare her daughter for a better life, a life that offered more than the narrow, ugly existence she hated. Petra saw that now. Wanting to stop your child from making the mistakes you had made. Just as she was doing with Molly.

“Christ, Pet, don’t look in this mirror.”

“What?”

“Magnifying
and
illuminated.” Sharon leaned foward. “I’ve got more open pores than Mars, mun. If I end up in a coma, will you come by with tweezers and take my chin hairs out?”

“Only if you do mine.”

“Course I will,” said Sharon happily. “Don’t want Mal seeing my beard. Got to keep
some
mystery in a relationship, that’s what they say.”

“Come on,” said Petra, “time to go.”

“I’ll be down in a minute. Need a pee now, or you don’t know what might happen when you see David, do you?”

“I’ll go and find Bill and we’ll see you downstairs,” said Petra.

In the lift on the way down to the lobby, she counted ten Petras in the mirrored walls. “Really not szo bad for a woman at your age,” she told her reflections. Past and present were so close now they were practically breathing the same air. What would the other girls in Gillian’s group think if they knew that Petra and Sharon were about to meet David Cassidy?

Last night, after the ice cream and the volcano and Bill, a sleepy Sharon had mentioned that Carol was a grandmother. Ryan. Gorgeous little boy. Bit of a handful, mind, like his mamgu. Carol brought him along whenever she and Sharon met for coffee. In the new place where
the Kardomah used to be. They had herb teas there now. Carol fell pregnant at sixteen and ended up behind the till at the Co-op. “She’s so proud of you, Pet. Well, we all are. You’re our star, aren’t you?”

Angela had gone back to England, no one was sure where. Olga did brilliantly in computer sciences and was working in America, Silicon Valley. Married a software engineer called Todd and they had two boys. Autistic, both of them. Tragedy, really, though Olga loved them to bits. Now she was pregnant again and they were praying the third baby would be a girl, you know.

And Gillian? Last thing Sharon and Carol heard, she had parted from her husband and set up some kind of dating agency in Maidenhead. Not just for any old lonely hearts. You had to be good-looking, with a high net worth. Gillian would see to that.

Just because she could.

“His favorite color was brown.”

“Sorry?” Bill looked up from the display cases in the hotel lobby. He was inspecting the jewelry, and doing the sums. You could fly here, get lucky, win a hundred and fifty thousand dollars at the roulette tables, nip out to the lobby, purchase a platinum and white-gold watch of blinding monstrosity, its face inlaid with so many diamonds that the hands were barely discernible—you couldn’t, in fact, tell the time, which more or less took away the point of the watch—and still get two dollars and fifty cents change, just enough for a twin-pack of Juicy Fruit for the flight home. Neither richer, nor poorer. A nice, well-rounded weekend that would be.

“I said his favorite color was brown. David’s.” Petra looked at him, as he straightened up. Then she saw the expression on his face. “Oh dear God,” she said, “don’t tell me you made
that
up as well.”

“ ’Fraid so. At least, I
think
so.” To his intense relief, Petra shook her head and laughed. This time yesterday, he thought, she would have kicked me. Or should have.

“Is there anything about him that is
actually
true? Anything not made up by you? I’m starting to believe he doesn’t exist. That he never did. You made up the boy I loved. He’s all yours.”

“No, no.” Now Bill was shaking
his
head. “No, that’s going too far. For one thing, you saw him yourself last night.”

“Hologram.”

“And you heard him.”

“CD player.”

“And you cried. Or Sharon did.”

“Weakness. Welshness.”

Bill took a moment to think.

“Okay, what about the bloke I saw at that press conference in 1974? The one who—”

“You
saw
him?” Petra was thirteen, again, in an instant; the years peeled back, and there she was.

“I met him. I went up to his hotel room, too, and we sat and—”

“You went to his
room
?” She actually had her mouth open, like a goldfish. “You mean, only one of us got to go to his room, and it was you? Why not me? I knew him better than you.” Petra had to check herself; she was losing her sense of play. Bill felt as much, and gently rescued her.

“Well,
that’s
true,” he conceded. “My David poster collection was pitiful. Did you kiss yours, on the wall?”

“Well, we did at Sharon’s. My mother, hard-core Wagner woman, she didn’t really do pop stars, so no posters in our house. But Sharon had this David shrine and we, you know, genuflected, and the odd snog.”

“Mm-hmm. You see, as a general rule, boys don’t kiss walls. We knock them down, with a tank if we have one, but we don’t kiss them. It’s like the songs. I played the records only when I wanted to nick a line for the mag.” He paused. “And who knows? Maybe his favorite color
was
brown.” He shrugged, and added, “Not that I could tell.”

“What d’you mean?” Petra said.

“Well …” Bill realized that he had opened up a trap for himself, and was now stepping into it, up to his knees. “I’m color-blind.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“So you didn’t even know what brown was anyway.”

“Well, that would be green to me.”

“You mean the world is full of cows eating brown grass.”

“The brown, brown grass of home,” Bill said. “I suppose so.”

“That is the saddest thing I ever heard.” Petra seemed upset on his behalf, more than he would have bargained for. She said, “What color are my eyes?”

Bill came close and looked into them. She didn’t blink.

“They’re just right,” he said.

“You sound like Goldilocks.”

“And there’s two of them. And they match.”

“Thank you.” She held her gaze, under his. Only with an effort, it seemed, did she raise it, glance over his shoulder and say, “Here comes trouble.”

Sharon was coming toward them on tiptoe, as if the lobby were full of sleepers whom she was trying not to wake. “My heels’re giving me a headache,” she said, without preamble. “They’ve got this really loud clack, like.” She was wearing the largest pair of sunglasses Petra had ever seen. Jackie Onassis could have lived behind them, incognito, for months.

“Sha, what are they like? You look like you’ve got two tellies strapped to your face. And the label’s still hanging down the side.”

“Great, aren’t they?” Sharon said, drinking in the praise. “Georgie Versace.” She turned to Bill. “Morning, David.”

“I—”

“Oh come off it, we know you’re him, really.”

Petra chimed in. “That’s what I was just saying. And he can’t prove any different. We’re going to go up to David’s suite in a minute, when his PA or agent or whatever comes down to fetch us, and it won’t be David Cassidy at all. It’ll be him.” She looked at Bill. “Better be off. Why not take the service lift and get a head start? Got to get into your white catsuit and everything by the time we arrive.” She frowned at him. “We won’t accept anything less, you know.”

“ ’Sright,” said Sharon. “Or maybe the red tails, like he wore at White City. That’d suit you.”

“Possibly,” said Bill. “I mean I
packed
them, of course, but I thought, in the end, no, they’re a bit quiet for the occasion. Just not enough rhinestone for the kind of impact I was hoping to make. Also,” he said ruefully, “I forgot the bow tie.”

“Well, of course it’s useless without the sparkly tie,” said Petra.
Sharon nodded eagerly at her side, like someone convinced that this was genuinely going to happen. “Nice research, though.”

“What?”

“Remembering the bow tie. We’ve got the photos to prove it. You had to cut out the pictures and stick them in your magazine, did you?”

“Oh no,” said Bill. “I was there.”

“What?” This was both of them: Petra and Sharon, in chorus.