The First Death of David Cassidy

by Dave Swann

It had taken them thirteen years to learn how, but suddenly the girls were floating.

At first, they rose only inches from their stools in the chemistry lab. But I was so weighed down with underwater telegraph cables that I missed the moment when they escaped gravity.

Then Christine drifted over my desk, as serene as a summer cloud. Her eyes were shut, lashes fluttering as if she’d entered a blissful dream. Christine was the lass I’d worn the weights for, in return for being allowed to stare at the back of her head during double chemistry. Other boys were carting around buckets of industrial rubble for her, or wearing deep-sea diving boots. Bryan Douglas had glued shot puts to his hands, and the class genius Ronnie Clayton was totally encased in slow-drying cement.

Now other girls were rising too, in states of quiet rapture, and boys all around me were struggling to reach them. But some had been tied to tractors and others welded onto anvils by their ears, and it was no use.

Bryan Douglas was the first to work out the rules. The girls started to float when they imagined themselves doing things with boys – and this ought to be encouraging, because we were boys, too…

But the class genius Ronnie Clayton sighed. Unfortunately we weren’t the boys they imagined doing things with, he told Bryan, speaking through a slot in the slow-drying cement. ‘Those are boys in different places,’ he said. ‘And we wouldn’t be those boys even if we went to the other places, Bryan.’

Ronnie had used his genius to decipher the code words that freed the girls from gravity. These code words included ‘Cassidy’ and ‘Osmond’ – although the latter needed careful precision. For instance, any combination of ‘Osmond’ with the words ‘Wayne’, ‘Merrill’ or ‘Alan’ would summon the wrong kind of levitation, jerky and uneven. To get the perfect glide on, the girls used a book of spells called Jackie, and needed the right conditions, including spots of rain on classroom windows and Bunsen burners quietly bubbling while a teacher droned on about the acidic content of Podzol soils. Then, slowly, up they’d go, as Bryan predicted – the whole lot of them, as airy and light as balloons – until Mr Podzol had to summon the janitor to poke the girls down from the ceiling with a mop handle.

The janitor was a blunt Lancastrian named Mr Gridlock, whose main duty was to feed the school furnace, apparently with badly-behaved first formers and uneaten tapioca pudding. On that infamous day, it wasn’t the janitor’s stick that felled the girls, and it wasn’t our burdens, which we were forever jangling and rattling, to make the girls finally notice our sufferings. No, the force that lowered the lasses from their reverie entered the classroom invisibly, on a draught of air, as rumours always do. What started as an ominous whisper soon became louder and more urgent, until the gossip had everyone in its spiralling grip – and finally, our no-nonsense janitor, Mr Gridlock, returned to utter the dreaded words: ‘Is there any truth in this rumour? Has the pop star David Cassidy been killed in a car crash?’

The girls plummeted from the ceiling as one organism, and knocked us off our stools, and scorched themselves on the burners, and they dislodged the acid bath’s lid so that some fell directly into the acid and others rolled screaming through flames of potassium.

Then Christine crashed through the lab’s enormous plate-glass window and vanished into the drizzly wastes beyond.

Feverishly, I unwound the vast underwater telegraph cable and crawled out from beneath piles of crushed bodies, and beat a path through the flames.

Outside, I saw Christine tumbling down the hill, as crazy as a spinning top. She was on fire, and screaming – and the cliffs at the foot of the hill were close.

‘Christine!’ I called. ‘I’ve removed the cable I wore for you. It was a big cable, actually the one that used to span the seabed between Cornwall and the Spanish mainland, but I managed it quite easily – and all with the intention of saving you, Christine! Christine, hold on, Christine!’ It was a bit of a mouthful, but I hoped no one had noticed amidst all the chaos, and I tore down the hill, passing the armada of ambulances and fire engines now rushing the other way.

At the cliff edge, I gazed over the waters, raging in a tempest.

‘They’ve whipped it up with their grief,’ said a plot-convenient old bloke, going by with his Labrador. ‘Whoever you’re searching for, she’s likely to have become victim of what is known by sociologists as a folk panic.’

Undaunted, I took off my shirt, and prepared to dive into the maelstrom. It was exactly as I’d secretly planned it: a colossal disaster, mainly affecting girls I fancied.

‘Christine!’ I called as I dived. ‘I’m coming, Christine!’

She was about to drown when I reached her, and quickly lashed together a raft from test tubes that I’d managed to collect before leaving the chemistry lab.

‘You came,’ she said, slowly losing consciousness.

‘Yes, I’m here,’ I said. The raft was sinking now, but I put my hand in hers, and felt us slowly rise, until we were free of those deadly waves, and floating together through her dream.

When we drifted over the burning school, I pointed down, but Christine’s eyelashes were fluttering, and she said: ‘Yes, it’s sad about almost everybody dying – but the main thing is, we’re together now, David.’

My name was Keith, but I didn’t say anything about that, not even when she drowsily described the stickers she’d collected of me, and how many of my records she owned.

Gently, I hushed her, and closed her hand around mine, and we climbed steadily, into new heights. I was free of my burdens now, and the whole sky lay in front of us. And if she thought I was somebody else – well, we could discuss that later, when we were both less stressed.