by Freya North
‘Bollocks!’ came Nigel's voice from behind the Telegraph, while Paul asked Miranda if he could have a flip through the magazine once she'd finished.
‘Only an English teacher could use “zeitgeist” in such a context,’ Arlo laughed, spooning instant coffee granules into a relatively clean mug. ‘Anyone for tennis? Paul? Fancy a knock-about?’
‘I'm busy,’ said Paul, shaking the Sun and snapping it open again.
‘Dickhead,’ Arlo laughed. ‘Nige? Come on, a quick game, set and match? You slaughtered me last week.’
‘And I'd love to slaughter you again, but I'm nipping into Stokesley for a haircut.’
‘You look gorgeous, Mr Garton,’ Arlo teased, ‘for a physics teacher.’
‘I've got a date,’ Nigel said.
‘I'll come,’ said Miranda.
‘No, you won't,’ Nigel said, ‘much as a threesome is on my wish list. But I try not to bed my colleagues.’
‘Not with you, prat,’ she said, ‘with you, Arlo – I'll have a knock-up with you.’
‘Ooh er, missy,’ murmured Paul, who obviously wasn't as engrossed in the Sun as the others thought.
Arlo gave her a glancing smile and made much of checking his watch. ‘Actually, on second thoughts, I think I'll go into Stokesley with Nige and get my hair cut too.’
‘You haven't got any bloody hair, Arlo,’ Paul piped up again.
‘I have more than you,’ said Arlo, running the palm of his hand lightly over the fuzz of his crop. ‘This is long, for me. I can practically do a comb-over on my receded parts.’
‘Do you have a date too?’ Paul asked.
Arlo baulked.
‘Well, you're not joining me,’ Nigel protested.
Paul caught the look on Miranda's face that said, I'll be your date Arlo, before she buried her head in Heat when she sensed she'd been noticed.
‘Miranda's got a demon serve,’ Paul told Arlo.
‘Another time,’ Arlo told her. ‘I'll come into Stokesley with you, Nige.’
They belted along an empty road, lush flat fields to the left soon giving way to the sparser grazing on the moors rising and rolling away.
‘Daft, isn't it,’ Arlo remarked. ‘We're the teachers but I feel like I'm bunking off.’
‘You need to get out more,’ Nigel teased.
‘Probably,’ Arlo conceded. ‘It's just so easy to not leave the school grounds now. When I first joined, I was exploring the region at every opportunity – rarely stayed in unless I was on duty. Now, four years on, I go out for a haircut, or to the pub once a week for precisely three pints and a scotch, and that's about it.’
‘It's cyclical,’ Nigel said. ‘I went through that. But I've been there two years longer than you and I'm telling you, I now plan my next outing hourly.’
‘Who's your date?’ Arlo asked.
‘She's called Jennifer,’ said Nigel. ‘I met her in Great Ayton last weekend. She was in front of me in the ice-cream queue at Suggitts.’
‘You sad old git,’ Arlo laughed, ‘spending your free time hanging out at ice-cream shops waiting for totty.’
‘Sod off,’ Nigel said. ‘She's a lawyer. She was with some cycling group and they'd stopped off at Suggitts. You know how they do. All those Sunday riders.’
‘Well,’ Arlo said thoughtfully, ‘good luck.’
‘Haven't had a shag in months,’ Nigel muttered. He looked at Arlo though he knew the answer. ‘You?’
‘Nope,’ Arlo said, assuming Nigel knew it was actually years but didn't dare comment.
‘Miranda Oates would have you,’ Nigel told him.
‘I don't mix work and pleasure,’ Arlo said.
‘All work and no play … as they say,’ Nigel warned him, pulling into a parking bay and putting a permit on his dashboard.
‘She isn't my type,’ Arlo said.
‘Who is, then?’ Nigel asked as they walked towards the barbers. ‘In all the time I've known you, I haven't a clue who your type is.’
‘It's not that simple,’ said Arlo, relieved that they'd arrived.
*
Half an hour later, they were back in the car, Nigel's short black hair slicked this way and that with product-assisted trendy nonchalance. Arlo's hair was cropped even closer to his head, the style coming more from the fine shape of his skull, his smooth forehead, the slight but neat receding of his hairline. ‘I can't believe they charge me twelve quid for what was essentially a couple of minutes with mini horse clippers.’
‘Mine was twelve quid too – and I had a blow-dry and a load of styling goop,’ Nigel laughed.
‘And you look lovely, darling,’ Arlo said drily. ‘It'll be your lucky night.’ Nigel swerved as he turned to wink at Arlo, before tootling more cautiously through Stokesley and back out into the countryside.
‘It's a nice enough spring day – but this is a wee bit optimistic,’ Arlo commented, as “Summer in the City” played on the radio. Both he and Nigel knew they would have to tolerate the usual squalls and sudden chills of April before they could move truly to spring, let alone nearer to summer.
‘What exactly is a “loving spoonful”, I've always wondered,’ mused Nigel. ‘I think it might be a type of cake. Or a wedding spoon like those Welsh love spoons. Or perhaps a feed-the-poor charity?’
‘Stop philosophising and step on it, will you,’ Arlo said. ‘We'll miss last lunch at this rate.’
‘My hunger is for Jenn,’ Nigel growled lustily.
‘You prick,’ Arlo laughed. ‘Come on, I'm starving.’
They drove along, commenting on the Radio 2 playlist, humming and occasionally singing out loud. Nigel started some lengthy anecdote about a previous girlfriend and a curry when suddenly Arlo wasn't listening at all because “Among the Flowers” was playing on the radio. The lyrics more chantingly familiar to him than the words to the Lord's Prayer. The melody the theme tune to his life.
‘Do you remember this one?’ said Nigel, turning up the volume and tra-la-ing to the closing bars. ‘Awesome song.’
‘I wrote it,’ Arlo said quietly.
Nigel laughed. ‘And I wrote “Jumping Jack Flash”.’
Arlo didn't respond. What was the point? The song, so much a part of his life, was nevertheless part of a past life so different and distant to that which he currently led.
Now “Mr Tambourine Man” was playing.
‘And I wrote this one, too,’ Nigel said, singing along dreadfully. ‘Hang on, this isn't Bob Dylan.’
‘It's the Byrds,’ Arlo said patiently. ‘Dylan wrote it. The Byrds adapted the lyrics and added a twelve-string guitar lead and I did write the one before.’
‘“The One Before”?’
‘No – the previous song. “Among the Flowers”.’
‘Sure you did,’ said Nigel, busy zooming up the school's majestic driveway, whacking over the speed ramps, hurtling into the car park with a lively skid along the meticulously raked gravel. He switched off the engine.
‘I did,’ said Arlo.
‘You need to get out more, Savidge,’ said Nigel, ‘you really do.’
Arlo's Year Eight thought pretty much the same thing that afternoon. But they weren't complaining. He hadn't said a thing to them all lesson, just looked at them queerly, while Beethoven filled the room. The 5th piano concerto. “The Emperor”. And however much Arlo loved the music, just then he couldn't hear a note. And however much he loved his job, though he stood in front of his desk with his eyes trained on the twenty-two boys before him, he didn't much notice them at all. He was somewhere else entirely and, for a few moments, he didn't want to be there at all – horribly ensconced in five years ago. So he flung himself back further still. And was charmed to arrive back at half his lifetime ago, when he was seventeen and in the Lower Sixth at school and had written the song he still considers his best.
* * *
“Among the Flowers”. In terms of subject matter, the seventeen-year-old Arlo had risked derision by his school-mates but the melody he had cr
eated was so sublime that it immediately excused the unmitigated romance of the lyric. He wasn't really aware of the starting point. Usually, the songs he wrote for his band were inspired by his fiery teenage response to political injustice worldwide and his middle-class upbringing. But “Among the Flowers” was utterly at odds with “Soweto Sweat” and “Not Quiet on the Western Front” and “Life under Cardboard” – all of which had swiftly become veritable anthems at Milton College. Perhaps studying Tess of the D'Urbervilles for A level English had been a subliminal source. He'd fallen a little bit in love with Tess, had seen her through Angel's eyes, when she walks through the juicy grass and floating pollen of the garden at Talbothays, drawn by Angel's harp but conscious of neither time nor space, her skirts gathering cuckoo-spittle as she meanders through the dazzling polychrome of flowering weeds. But ultimately, Arlo's Flower Girl was wholly mythical. She embodied the woman he was aspiring to hold as his own one day. He thought that if he could create his ideal, set his wish list to the six strings of his guitar, perhaps he could lure her to him, perhaps he'd give her life.
His then girlfriend was lovely enough but she didn't inspire him to write. He'd lost his virginity to the girlfriend before that one and she'd made him horny as hell but love hadn't come into it. Love was out there, of that he was sure, but even at seventeen Arlo trusted the logic of time and, for the time being, he embraced (rather physically) the fact that schoolgirls were to be very nice stepping stones towards the real thing. Arlo assumed, quite sensibly, that his teenage years should be about amorous fumblings and sticky sex. He had a feeling that university would probably provide more adventurous fornication and a serious relationship or two. And he imagined that his walk through the flowers to the love of his lifetime would probably be taken in his late twenties.
What he was not expecting, at the age of seventeen and on the day his band had been invited to play a lunch-time set at the nearby private girls' school, was to come across his flower girl in bud. He had no idea that a fifteen-year-old girl would so completely embody the fantasy he eulogized in “Among the Flowers”. But having sung about Soweto to a sea of bouncing schoolgirls, having had them clap their hands above their heads to “Nuclear No” and chant the chorus of “Set Them Free”, he launched into the melodious and ethereal “Among the Flowers”. And there, from the sway and the smiles of one hundred and fifty pubescent schoolgirls, on that first Wednesday in March seventeen years ago, Arlo Savidge had caught sight of Petra Flint and realized in an instant that he'd written the song solely for her.
* * *
Arlo quite liked evening prep. More than seeming an after-hours affliction cutting into his evening, it was a quiet and useful hour and a half when none of the boys pestered him, concentrating their energies instead on finishing their homework so they could make the most of their free time before bed. Usually, Arlo used prep to do his marking or planning, or he'd write to his mother, perhaps check his bank statements; sometimes he just read a book, other times he simply sat and thought of nothing, occasionally he sat and thought about quite a lot. Tonight was one of those times.
‘What is it, Troy? No, you don't – you can borrow my pen instead.’
Hearing “Among the Flowers” on the radio at lunch-time had sounded odder to Arlo than when Rox had first released it five years previously. It seemed so totally out of context that he should be listening to it, on Radio 2, in the middle of North Yorkshire, as he returned to his teaching job having just had a haircut. He didn't blame Nigel for not believing him. It wouldn't cross Nigel's mind that he was telling the truth. Why should it? Who has songs published and played on national radio, yet teaches music at a boys' private boarding school in North Yorkshire? For Nigel it had just been typical banter; they were at it all the time after all, the staff. A little like grown-up schoolboys themselves; mercilessly teasing each other, taking the piss, saying daft things, catching each other out.
‘Lars – give Nathan back his calculator, please. Come on, guys.’
Was it self-indulgent, Arlo wondered, to have one's own song on one's mind? Was it an insult to Bob Dylan – for Arlo, the greatest songwriter of all time – that all afternoon he had so easily forsaken “Mr Tambourine Man” to mentally play his own ditty, penned at seventeen years of age, over and over again instead? Similarly, that he'd utterly blanked Beethoven? The version of “Among the Flowers” on a loop in his head was most certainly his own, not the version covered by Rox. He didn't mind their interpretation – and it brought welcome royalties each year. He didn't much care for Rox's subjugation of the acoustic emphasis he'd intended in favour of soft sentimental rock, but he could see why their record label would have encouraged it. Much more Top of the Pops – as indeed it had been five years ago. And his version, the way he conceived it, wrote it, had only ever sung it, was in all probability a bit introspectively adolescent. Not commercial enough. Not slick enough. It occurred to Arlo that he hadn't actually sung it in years. He'd written other stuff since. Not that he sang that much either. And though he knew “Among the Flowers” off by heart he doubted he'd ever sing it out loud again. It was tainted now, charred.
But it was different when he wrote it, over a decade before Rox took it. He liked who he'd been back then. The keenness, the naivety, the energy and optimism for the future: for Life, for the mystery of Love.
Petra Flint.
Blimey.
Now there's someone he hadn't thought about for a while.
Arlo glanced around the class as if he'd just spoken out loud, but the boys had their heads down.
‘Finn, stop chewing your shirtsleeve.’
When Rox had first released the song and had nodded their shaggy locks and generally postured in a deep and meaningful way on Top of the Pops, Arlo had briefly wondered about Petra, whether she was watching, whether she'd heard the song, remembered it, remembered him. But there had been so much else on his mind five years ago, he hadn't had the capacity to dwell on it.
He thought about her now, though. In evening prep. Petra Flint. His unwitting muse and the prettiest girl he'd seen back then; the personification of the song's subject matter who came into his focus out of nowhere the day that the Noble Savages had performed at her school. Whatever happened to Petra Flint?
‘Nathan, flick one more ink pellet at Troy and you'll forfeit your next exeat.’
Petra Flint is probably an artist or a housewife, Arlo decided, bringing himself back to the present sharply. And here he was, aged thirty-four, sitting in an oak-panelled study room in a school that was over three hundred years old, presiding over twenty teenage boys who were battling with their homework and tiredness and boredom and their need to be just boys. He looked at them. They looked like a bunch of scraggly terriers who could well do with a noisy belt around the playing fields. He tried to see himself through their eyes. One of the slightly more cool teachers, he reckoned with some satisfaction: his small gold hoop earring, his excitingly varied taste in music, his occasional swearing, the fact that he had a tattoo on his upper arm which the boys had glimpsed but never seen in full, the fact that he called the boys ‘guys’, that he told them, when they asked him, that yes he had done certain drugs at certain times in his life. They'd never asked him about sex, though. They reserved that topic as a dare – preferring to cloak their queries with faked innocence and pose them to female members of staff instead. The cheeky buggers. Or perhaps they didn't ask him because he didn't give out that vibe. You can ask Mr Sir Savidge about music and drugs and tattoos because he knows about all that stuff. But don't ask him about sex because he doesn't have sex any more.
And if ever they should ask him, what would he say then? That he was celibate from personal choice? And that had been the case for five years? Was that the line he'd spin to Miranda Oates if she kept up her attention? Arlo thought about Miranda Oates with her shapely rear, her nice tits, her penchant for dark lipstick and bare legs, her obvious interest in him. And he wondered if it wasn't just a bit sad, perhaps a little worry
ing, that he was thinking of inventive ways to fob her off when once he would quite happily have shagged her, gamely dated her even.
‘That's the end of that,’ he said, suddenly out loud, and the boys took it to mean the end of prep and scarpered from the room a full five minutes early.
Chapter Five
Despite the mercy dash to Whetstone in the small hours, Rob's meeting with the Japanese had gone well. Petra was very tired after the previous night's sortie and though most of all she craved an early night, she'd phoned Rob and offered to cook at either her place or his. He suggested she join him in town. Getting ready, she asked herself a couple of times why she was doing something she didn't want to do, why didn't she just slob around at home and eat finger food in front of Location Location Location. But she answered herself sharply – her relationship with Rob was just ten months old and there was no time for complacency. Furthermore, Rob seldom invited her to socialize with his work people, though he frequently did. So she should be honoured, she told herself. And she shouldn't let bloody sleep, or lack of it, dictate her life. She stood in her bedroom in a bath towel and wondered what she could wear that was appropriate for a night on the town with Rob and his cohorts, but would be comfortable. Her grazed knee was still too raw to go plasterless and her blistered heels necessitated backless shoes. But not my Birkenstocks, Petra thought, not on Rob's big night – he'd be appalled. She decided to wear her slippers because they didn't look too much like slippers; indeed, people wore a similar style as shoes. A pair of slip-on flat mules in a type of glorified plastic netting decorated with sequins and beads. She'd have to wear socks or tights because she couldn't very well have her heels on display, with plasters or without. She hated anything drawing attention to herself. Just then, for a moment, she hated herself more for sleepwalking.
‘If I didn't bloody sleepwalk, I could be tottering about in strappy heels. Not that I own a pair,’ she muttered to herself, slouching in front of the mirror. ‘Pop socks and slippers. For Christ's sake.’ In the event, her cropped black trousers covered the offending top of the pop socks, and a plain black camisole teamed with a cardigan lightly decorated with beads gave her look a cohesion that pleasantly surprised her. Concealer helped with the bags under her eyes and mascara widened them beyond their weary proportions. On the tube, she congratulated her inventiveness: no one gave her a second look or even registered her choice of footwear.