I Think I Love You (9 page)

“Not much, hnyah,” said Chas.

“I mean, imagine being one of those girls. The ones who win our tickets.”

The other two peered at him, not quite sure if they liked his drift, let alone his imagination.

“Come again?” Chas was wrinkling his nose and rubbing the tip. He was getting thirsty, almost to the point of using his own cash.

“Well, they sit all day in, in, Hartlepool, or Worthing, or, or—”

“Fife. We’ve had some loonies from Fife.”

“And then one day, they get chosen to go and see the guy in person. I mean, these girls feel chosen anyway. They feel he’s waiting for them.” Bill looked at his colleagues. “Believe me, I know, I read their bloody letters. That’s my job, okay? And now they will be chosen. Some girl will already be able to tell you Cassidy’s favorite color and the color of his eyes, and whether he likes cornflakes or Rice Krispies, whether he has freckles—”

“He doesn’t.” Pete sounded firmer than normal, like a defendant denying the charges in court. “No freckles. He has spots. Scores of the buggers. Believe me, Bill, I know, I scrub them out. That’s my job.” He glanced down at Chas, who snickered on cue.

“Touché,” said Bill.

“To what?”

“Doesn’t matter. Point is, if I already knew the poor bloke’s star sign, and I could read my future in his stars and all that palaver, I would open my envelope from the magazine, as licked and sealed by Chas”—whose tongue stuck out at this, again on cue—“and I would just, you know, faint. Or die.”

For a moment, neither of the others spoke. Then Pete inquired: “What is it, anyway?”

“What’s what?”

“His star sign?”

“Aries, but that’s not the point. What I’m trying—”

But he had gone too far, and the others leaped.

“Ayr-ries? You
are
a wanker! I knew it,” said Pete.

So great was Chas’s glee that he actually bunched his bony little fists and beat them together, like a wind-up monkey playing the cymbals. They had a fellow worker who knew the horoscope of a male pop star: you could sit next to someone for five years and not find anything as juicy as that. They might as well have discovered Bill sleeping with a teddy bear, or combing a doll’s hair.

Bill let their pleasure rise and subside. Nothing he could do about it; they would stash his confession away and use it in the future, whenever he needed embarrassing. Could be anytime.

He had only himself to blame. That morning, Bill had completed a feature about David’s star sign under the headline
MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL, WHO’S THE GROOVIEST ARIAN OF THEM ALL?
Bill despised astrology, although, to be fair, it was hard to hate something that didn’t exist. It was like reading a travel article about the best hotels in Atlantis. But girls liked it, he had noticed, even sensible ones; even clever ones, girls with degrees in philosophy or history who could pull apart the basis of the Christian faith over a prawn curry but would still take their pen, on the bus ride home, and draw a careful red circle around the prediction that, come Tuesday, Sagittarians would feel an upswing in their private life that could be risky but that, handled wisely, might produce a major change. Ruth, for example, was on the cusp between Cancer and Leo, so she read the forecast for each sign and picked the one she liked best. Bill was astounded that the future of their relationship might hang on whether his girlfriend woke up feeling more like a lion than a crab.

No constellations wheeled above the street. No stars, however bright, could beam their messages of encouragement and caution through the soup of London air. Bill shook himself.

“All right, you two,” he said. “I’m done. See you on—”

But he never named the day. He had paused, on the brink, to stare past Pete and over Chas’s head; his shame forgotten, his focus locked elsewhere. Down the street came something that was not meant to come down streets; certainly not small streets off Tottenham Court Road, with a low breeze blowing used sports pages onto the roadway and wads of Juicy Fruit stuck to the curb. It was vast and flat, and as it prowled along it growled at the drinkers on either side, who instinctively leaned back to let it pass, raising their drinks to shoulder level. To Bill, it was as if he were six years old, on horseback, beside a castle moat, with a dragon coming over the drawbridge, breathing flame.

“Jesus,” he said. “An Espada.”

Chas, who was unimpressed by the vision, and, more important, could see no good reason anyone else should be impressed, picked up the sound.

“Ay vee-va, Espadya,” he sang, to no one in particular.

“That’s not a car,” said Pete. “That’s an aircraft carrier.” His breath
came out in a rush as he spoke, and Bill realized that he must have been holding it.

“It’s an S2,” said Bill.

“Could even be an S3. Try and check the steering wheel as it goes by. They updated it last year.” Pete and Bill had been seeking common ground for some weeks now, something that would lead them beyond the habit of rubbishing office life, and Bill, for one, who feared friendlessness more than most things, had almost despaired of establishing any point of contact. Now they had found one.

“What’s all this S bollocks?” asked Chas.

“Well, the engine’s pretty much the same, but they’ve changed it a couple of times since ’68, and you can really tell only from the interior,” Bill said.

“Who’s they?”

“Lamborghini.” Bill was genuinely astonished. He thought that such a passion was obvious, infectious and shared by every man. “Don’t you recognize it?”

“Bog off.”

There was a stifled laugh from beside him. Two women, holding gin and tonics, were listening. When Bill looked at them they glanced away.

“Christ, look at it,” said Pete. “It’s so low.”

The car was almost alongside now, moving warily, between the drinkers on either side of the street. They almost stood to attention, as if making way for a hearse. The roof barely reached Bill’s chest, and he had to duck down to look inside. He couldn’t make out the steering wheel, but he did catch a flash of sideburns, and a roll-neck sweater that matched the cream interior. Chas, bent almost double, had seen it too, and for him that decided it. He straightened up, with a curling lip, and said out loud, “Tosser.” Bill knew he was right, but he couldn’t keep his eyes off the car. As it cleared the mob, it quickened, the growl becoming a low roar, then turned and was lost from sight.

“Never seen one before.” Pete stood staring down the empty street.

“Me neither,” Bill said.

“So how d’you know about the inside and all that bollocks?” Chas asked. He seemed perplexed.

“Read it in
Autocar
. They had a Lambo special couple of months ago,” said Pete.

“God, yeah, did you see that bit where they took a Miura P400SV and put it against the Daytona?”

“Fantastic. Just brilliant. But I hate the way they took the eyelashes off the SV. I mean, I know it’s got better carbs and everything, but the lashes were the best bit. Give me the S any day.”

“I know.” Bill had more to say on the subject, but even as he spoke he was conscious of having crossed a line. Pete couldn’t care less—as far as he was concerned, he had witnessed a miracle, and would feel free to tell everyone about it for the rest of his days—but Bill had just noticed the two women screwing up their faces in bewilderment and scorn.

“What bloody eyelashes?” Chas was still there, shifting from foot to foot as if he needed to pee, though all he really needed was a drink. Bill felt uneasy. He spoke dismissively, trying to win back lost favor.

“Oh, some crap about the headlight surround on the Miura. Earlier ones had these kind of black strokes at the top and bottom, and they were supposed to look like, you know, when a girl does her eyes, and …” He trailed off. Chas didn’t reply, at least not with anything resembling a word. He puckered his mouth and blew a spitting sound, like someone ejecting an apple pip. Then he lowered his head, turned and melted into the throng around the entrance to the pub.

Pete, too, shook himself, as though coming out of a trance, and said brightly, “Well, mustn’t hang about. Dinner on the table. See you Monday.” He walked up the street toward the Tube. After a minute or so, Bill, who had not said good-bye, went the other way, digging in his pockets for a cigarette that he knew he didn’t have. He was suddenly unhappy, though why he couldn’t say. It was like being a small boy, unable, for a second, to find his parents in a crowd. The two women watched him go. One of them, her hair piled high, reached into the bottom of her glass, retrieved a slice of lemon and began to nibble.

“Like I said,” she told her friend. “Men.”

He was supposed to take Ruth out on Friday nights. Friday nights were girlfriend and curry nights, but he hadn’t been able to face it. Not tonight. Ruth was thrilled with his new job as a rock journalist. Not
only was Bill off the dole and no longer an embarrassment, scrounging food out of the fridge in the Bloomsbury mansion-block flat she shared with Lesley and Judith, a couple of trainee solicitors; he was also doing something that lent Ruth herself a certain cool. For a museum assistant, who spent her days photocopying layouts of Anglo-Saxon burial mounds while dreaming of something less dead, it was thrilling to be able to say the word
boyfriend
in the same sentence as the name Mick Jagger. Bill had never known her so proud or so happy. It was hideous.

Obviously, he would never set out to deceive the girl he was supposed to love. It was just that when Ruth asked for more details of Bill’s brilliant new writing job, he had been physically unable to speak the words
Essential David Cassidy Magazine
. Until that moment, he had not realized that the one thing he truly feared about women was their disappointment. Worse than anger, worse even than tears, female disappointment seemed almost operatic in its power to make the male feel worthless.

When you asked them what was wrong on their birthday and they said, “Oh, nothing”—that was the worst. For some reason, “Oh, nothing” was to be even more feared than a simple “Nothing.” A long apprenticeship as little brother to two older sisters, who alternately petted him or told him to get lost, had not prepared Bill for a girlfriend who expected you to read her mind, often, it seemed, before that mind was made up.

Ruth was kind enough to be glad for him about the job. But mainly, he suspected, she was chuffed that choosing Bill as a boyfriend had finally paid off. The loser known as Socks by her flatmates, because of the cheesy trail he left around the flat, was suddenly a man to be reckoned with. Lesley and Judith were both engaged, one to a civil engineer, the other to a wine merchant in Parsons Green. He had seen Ruth struggling bravely through the flatmates’ shared rapture over Lesley’s engagement ring—a sapphire with flanking slabs of diamonds. “White gold,” she reported. “They had it made to order at Hatton Garden. Chose the diamonds and everything.” So when it came to telling Ruth about his work, Bill had settled for “journalist” and “music business.” Not untrue, though not exactly true, either.

He thought there would be loads of time to put her right later. But the night he accepted the offer from Roy Palmer, Ruth had given him a
hero’s reception when he got back to the Bloomsbury flat. There was a whole chicken cooked in some kind of brick with baked potatoes followed by roasted peaches. He had only ever tried tinned with condensed milk. After the afters, there was sex of a kind Ruth had never offered before; if not quite the kind of sex that rock stars had, or even the kind that he thought they had, then certainly the kind that he thought she thought they had. Which was rock star enough for him, to be getting on with. He felt like a peach. Fuzzy with pleasure. So, after that, Bill was in no real hurry to set Ruth straight about how he spent his days. When would be the best time to reveal to your girlfriend that you composed flirtatious letters to lovesick thirteen-year-olds?

Never would be the best time.

The lies Bill had told weighed heavily on him, though even worse was the thought of all the lies he would have to tell in the foreseeable future, with larger lies brought in to bury the smaller fragments. Bill was up to his neck in layer upon layer of untruth, as though interred in one of Ruth’s burial mounds. He had already had to pretend that he was writing under an alias when Ruth asked to see the reviews, which he hadn’t written, in a magazine he didn’t work for. Plus there was the constant threat of discovery. The museum was only ten minutes on foot from Worldwind Publishing. Ruth could easily turn up during her lunch hour. Only the monstrous portrait he had painted of Roy Palmer—a volatile compound of Al Capone and William Randolph Hearst—had thus far kept her away.

Men who lead a double life must get satisfaction from it, or why would they take the risk? That was the theory, but Bill was the sorry exception: his double life had all the dangers of being found out but none of the practical pleasures. Could there be—had there ever been—anything more humiliating than having David Cassidy as your other woman?

Bill caught himself singing under his breath. Christ. That was the trouble with Cassidy songs. Once they got into your brain they stuck there
like chewing gum. Long after he had forgotten all of Tennyson and Keats, he would be able to give a confident rendition of “How Can I Be Sure.”

There had been a nasty moment, a couple of weekends before, when he had gone round to Ruth’s flat to pick her up on the way to a party, and for once—unusual for her, since she was so much more punctual than him—she wasn’t ready. “Give me five mins,” she had said, which meant fifteen. So he had idled the time away in the girls’ living room, read the spines on the bookshelf and sneered at some of the titles, then felt guilty about the sneer. I mean, why shouldn’t a woman read
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
if she wanted to? It was a free country, wasn’t it? Just so long as it wasn’t his woman. Please, God, not Ruth. Please, Ruth, not that.