I Think I Love You Read Free Page A

on the Sabbath and went upstairs to put a cardigan on and came down to watch the wrestling on TV, but always with the sound down, out of respect. It was really “whee yad” looking in through the windows as you ran down the hill toward the seafront, using your back shoe as a brake till you smelled the rubber, and seeing the big men in their leotards throwing each other about, silently bellowing and stamping their boots on the floor of the ring.
    Going round Sharon’s house was like a holiday for me. She had an older brother called Michael, who teased us, but in a funny way, you know, and a younger sister called Bethan, who had a crush on little Jimmy Osmond, if you can believe it. (We called him Jimmy Spacehopper because he had these little bunny features stuck in the middle of a round face like a balloon.) Sha also had a baby brother called Jonathan, who sucked Farley’s Rusks in his high chair till he got a crusty orange mustache that you could peel off in one piece when it got hard, and there were visitors who dropped in for a chat and stayed because they were too busy talking to notice the time. As for Sharon’s mum, well, she was lovely, you couldn’t ask for a nicer person. She knocked on the bedroom door, really respectful, and came in and offered us squash and Club biscuits. Always remembered that I preferred the currant ones in the purple wrapper, not the orange. Mrs. Lewis said she liked our David posters and she told us she still had a book of matches and a cocktail stick from the night Paul McCartney dropped into a club in Cardiff—1964 it was. Sharon’s mum was absolutely crazy about Paul. Said she had hated Linda for marrying him.
    “He was mine, you see.”
    Yes, we saw.
    My favorite thing was the David shrine on the back of Sharon’s door. She got it in a
Tiger Beat
her Auntie Doreen brought back all the way from Cincinnati, America. Four pictures fixed at mouth height so Shacould snog him on the way out to school in the morning. Like she was saying good-bye to a real lover boy. In the first picture, David had that shaggy haircut and a naughty smile. The second was this look—you know. In the third, his lips were puckered up, and in the fourth, well, he just looked really happy and pleased with himself, didn’t he?
    Over time, the four Davids became smeared and blurry with the Vaseline that Sharon used to soften her lips, a trick we copied from Gillian. Sometimes, Sharon let me have a go at kissing David Number 3. I wasn’t allowed posters on my wall at home because my mother believed that popular music could make you deaf and was really common and therefore appealing only to people like my dad, who worked down the steelworks and was a big Dean Martin man on the quiet—though that’s another story and I’m meant to be telling you this one.
    Well, at the start of that year, several things happened. Gillian—she was never just Gill—lent Sharon to me as my special friend. I was really happy, you know, but I sensed the loan could be called in any minute if Gillian’s infatuation with Angela, the new girl from England, ever cooled. The uncertainty gave me this feeling in my stomach like I was on a ferry or something and couldn’t get my balance. Most nights, I woke with a fright because my legs were kicking out under the sheets as if I had to save myself from falling, falling. Another thing was, the headmaster told me after assembly one morning that I was going to play the cello for Princess Margaret when she came to open our new school hall. She was the queen’s sister, and the lord mayor and some people called dignitrees were coming. But the really big news was that David Cassidy had postponed his tour of Britain after having his gallbladder removed. Two girls in Manchester were so upset they set themselves on fire, according to the mag.
    On fire! My God, the thought of the passion and the sacrifice of those girls, it burned in our heads for weeks. We hadn’t done anything that big for him.