I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson Read Free Book Online Page B

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