Free I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson

crisp.
    “What they said, that you’re one of them college wankers.”
    “Who said?” Bill asked in genuine curiosity, but Pete just sniffed. The crisp tasted damp. There was salt on his gums. Not for the first time he felt the full horror of being English: sitting in a packed pub, drinking swill, with someone you don’t care about, being quizzed about your social class. He asked himself—again, not for the first time—what it was like for David, living in California. Even if it was only a tenth as good as the songs made out, only a hundredth as sunny and relaxed as it looked in the films, it had to be better than this.
    He reached for his pint, downed the dregs and used them to rinse his mouth. As he did so, he shook his head, as if trying to rid himself of a thought, like a cow with flies on its eyes. Here I am, he reflected, a graduate, an adult, more or less, and I am jealous of David Cassidy. In his first three months of employment at Worldwind Publishing, Bill had devoted most of his waking hours to studying the life and style of David Bruce Cassidy—or, as Bill had described him to Pete, “that lucky sonofabitch.” The curse sounded false coming out of Bill’s mouth, he knew that. He had to take a run up at it, like a horse attempting a four-bar gate.
    Sun-nuv-vuh-bitch.
    You really needed the proper twang, like someone out of
Dirty Harry
or
The Dirty Dozen
—a dirty movie, anyway—to get the full effect, and Bill’s version of a twang was worse than useless. He had never been able to do accents, and his American was especially pathetic; he sounded, and indeed looked, like a man trying to dislodge a shred of meat from a back tooth with his tongue. But, for all that, and despite the fear of making a fool of himself, he loved
sonofabitch
. He loved it because, for a second, even if it didn’t make him come across as American, it made him
feel
American. And that was obviously better than being a twat from Tolworth, two stops down from Wimbledon.
    “Sorry, go on about the record,” he said, trying to restart. He couldsee Pete struggling between the urge to tell his story and the well-worn need to pick a fight. Eventually, he sighed, brushed the empty crisp packet onto the floor and carried on. The fight could wait.
    “Like I said, there’s this scratch, and they decide that’s an omen. Like it means something. Didn’t people used to look at guts to tell the future, Greeks and that?”
    “Absolutely,” said Bill, who let his neck slacken so his heavy head nodded and nodded like one of those toy dogs in the back window of a car. Who on earth had the strength for a fight on a Friday evening, with your spirit sapped by a week of slog at the premier David Cassidy fanzine? Pete could have denied the moon landings, at this moment, or the Holocaust, and Bill would have nodded along.
    “So, they decide that the scratch, which was only caused by her dad, is a message from Cassidy.” Pete would have broken his beer glass and chewed the shards rather than call a pop star, any pop star, by his Christian name. They weren’t friends, him and Cassidy. He didn’t know the bastard. Didn’t have him round for tea. And it wasn’t just pop stars, nancies like that. It was any fella. Surnames, all the way. To Pete, the tragedy of James Bond had come the previous year, when Connery had given way to Moore. The Aussie bloke didn’t count.
    “And because the scratch is on that song, the ‘Forever’ one,” he went on, “it means that Cassidy is striking it out, or some crap like that, or changing his mind. Instead of Can It Be”—he glanced at Bill, daring him to a challenge—“it means, sod the question, It Will Be. You Will Be Mine. You, you girls, sitting there with your purple hot pants and your stupid gonks.” For Pete, this was rhetoric enough, and he made a swiping motion, one hand across his face, as if to brush away the blame. “I read it,” he explained. “In that bloody rag we put