Pillow Talk

I wonder if he has ever stopped to wonder, over the years, whether I’ve been walking all alone, whether I’ve been lonely in the flowers? Rob sent me flowers last month after that blazing row when he stood me up but when they were delivered I buried my nose in them and as I inhaled their heady scent I sobbed. I felt desperately alone in those flowers.

Things seem to be quite good at the moment. Or at least, they’re getting better.

But just perhaps, just say things were better way back then. They say that our school years are the best years of our lives. Do I agree? Is that true? Is it still too early to tell? But I think back to all I achieved, to the colourful mix of my schoolmates, to the eccentricities of my teachers. Have I ever been part of such an intense mêlée of uniqueness since? We had school uniform – yet though young and not quite formed, we all stood distinct. When I went to college, all we students shared an unofficial, interchangeable uniform of our own which made everyone blend and bland. Slouchy grouchy stressed and broke. I don’t even know where Arlo went to university. Maybe he’s a super rock god in America. Perhaps he jacked it all in and is an accountant. Maybe he’s an impoverished musician in a garret in Clerkenwell. Or perhaps he’s a middle-class husband with 2.4 kids. Perhaps the litheness and the curls are gone and he has a paunch and a bald patch. I don’t know. But how beautiful that his music will always exist. What a legacy. It’s on the radio. It’s finishing.

‘That was Rox and a hit from five years ago, “Among the Flowers”. Beautiful. And it’s approaching midday so it’s over to Annie for the news and weather.’

Did you hear that? It was a hit five years ago. Where was I back then that I never heard it? Nowhere in particular. It just passed me by. How odd. Am I that square not to know what was top of the sodding pops five years ago? I have heard of Rox. But I didn’t know they covered Arlo’s song. I wonder how they came by it? Are there other bands out there covering his other tracks? Is he some hugely successful songwriter? Why am I even wondering about any of this? I saw him so rarely, if I think about it.

My school and Milton College used to join up for activities like choral society and pottery and drama club. I was never outgoing enough to go for drama club, and choral society was a bit naff, but I was very good at pottery. That summer term – the term after that lunch-time gig – I used to walk over to Milton College with Anna and Paula on Wednesday afternoons to do pottery. Some of the boys asked us if we’d come because we were good with our hands; I took it as a compliment and said yes – but Anna and Paula took it as a come-on and they were delighted and said things like, That’s for us to know and you to find out, guys.

We were good with our hands, us three. Very good. Paula and Anna took to the wheel and threw gorgeous pots and bowls. I liked working more organically and constructed great big urns that were really glorified coil pots which I’d burnish and burnish and then scarify the sheened surface with these dense little marks like hieroglyphics. I spent hours on them. Because it was summer, Mr Whatever His Name Was let me sit outside with my pots and my tools and that’s when I saw Arlo again. He walked across the playground over to me, like a strolling troubadour, strumming and humming until we shared a great big grin. Then he sat a little way off, playing.

Every Wednesday afternoon after that, during that summer term, he’d somehow appear when I appeared, mostly with his guitar. He never sang ‘Among the Flowers’ for me again. Not from beginning to end. Not with the words. Every now and then he’d hum it and strum it but very delicately, slipping a few bars in between other melodies. We kept each other’s company, those Wednesday afternoons, though we didn’t say much at all. I asked him what A levels he was doing. I can’t remember now. He asked me how many O levels I was taking. Christ, how many did I take? Eight. And passed seven. He told me about some of the mad teachers at his school. I told him all about Mrs McNeil. And then I didn’t really see him until the following spring because I chose print-making during the winter term. And though he’d’ve been swotting for A levels, he did find time most Wednesdays to find me. And we just picked up from where we’d left off.

‘How’s your little old lady?’ he’d ask, when we were sitting not talking and not really working. I’d tell him some of the stories she told me, some of the funny little errands I ran for her. Once he covered his eyes and winced and I asked what was wrong and he said my halo was so shiny and bright it hurt his eyes and I chucked a little wet clod of terracotta clay at him and he laughed. Mostly though, we shared happy little interludes of chat in an otherwise quietly industrious atmosphere. I was engrossed in my terracotta urns and he was deep in thoughts of chords and riffs. Out in the playground, in the warmth of his final summer term at school. We’d sit together, though we were actually a couple of yards apart. We were certainly sitting together none the less, separate yet united in our little hive of creativity and tenderness every Wednesday afternoon.

And now I make jewellery. I wonder what Arlo does because he used to make music. And, for the first time in seventeen years, I’ve just heard the song he wrote for me. On national radio.

Chapter Four

‘Sir,’ Nathan whined, ‘sir.’ He’d been saying ‘sir’ for ages but Sir didn’t seem to hear. Sir seemed a bit lost in thought, somewhat distracted by the bright spring morning ablaze outside. ‘Sir! Mr Savidge! Sir Savidge.’

Nathan’s teacher finally turned his attention to him, raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m liking the “Sir Savidge” moniker, Nathan. In fact, class – you can all call me Sir Savidge from now on. OK?’

‘Yes, sir. Savidge. Sir.’

‘Nathan – what can I do for you?’

‘Would you say that rhythm is the soul of music, sir?’

Arlo regarded his pupil, unable to keep an affectionate smile at bay. He remembered being just like Nathan. A keen fourteen-year-old, happy to study but also keen to add personal philosophy to the dry curriculum. God, what a gorgeous day it was. Warm too.

‘I mean, Sir Savidge, sir,’ Nathan said. ‘Rhythm is the soul of music – wouldn’t you say?’ he repeated, dragging his teacher’s gaze away from the view outside. ‘But sir, if you put that kind of thing in your GCSE do you think the judges give you better marks?’

Judges. Sirs. Arlo changed his sigh into another smile and focused on the boy. ‘I think the examiners would mark you higher if you said something along the lines of rhythm being the lifeblood of music, Nathan. Think of blood, all of you – how it pulses, how it pumps. If blood doesn’t pump – if it ceases to pulse around our bodies – what are we?’

The class was silent.

‘Come on, guys, what are we?’

The class loved it when their teacher called them ‘guys’. ‘Fish?’ offered Artemas.

‘Fish?’ said his teacher.

‘Fish are cold-blooded,’ Artemas muttered while the class began to snigger. ‘Isn’t that the same thing?’

‘No no no,’ Arlo said, thinking he ought to check it anyway with Mr Rose the biology teacher. ‘I’m talking physically and metaphysically. Come on, guys, if our blood isn’t being pumped then it’s not pulsing around our body – then what are we?’

The boys gawped at him.

‘We are dead!’ he said.

There was a murmur, a gasp or two. Schoolboys love the word ‘dead’.

‘So, if rhythm is the lifeblood of music, it must mean it is at the heart of it. Music needs rhythm to breathe its life into the listener – don’t you think?’ There was silence as twenty-five pens scribbled away at exercise books, frantic to copy Sir’s quote verbatim. Good old Artemas with his fish, Arlo thought. But poor old Nathan – he’d been on the right track but with the wrong metaphor, just a little unscientific when it came to the particular anatomy of music. Arlo considered how, though the whole class was committing his improvement on Nathan’s quote to memory, the GSCE examiners would no doubt put a red line through the lot. ‘If it’s not on the curriculum, it doesn’t exist,’ Arlo said under his breath though not so quietly that the eternally eager Finn right in front of him didn’t start to write that down too.

‘Finn – you can’t quote me on that.’

‘Sorry, sir.’

Arlo glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes till his charges swapped rhythm for the thwack of leather against willow. ‘Mussorgsky and Marley,’ he announced, browsing the CD shelves much to the boys’ anticipation. ‘They knew a thing or two about rhythm,’ Arlo said, loading discs into the machine. He tapped the remote control against his lips. ‘The Russian, Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, died in 1881 and the Jamaican, Robert Nesta Marley, died in 1981. Listen to this.’ He chose “Pictures at an Exhibition” by the former and “Get Up Stand Up” by the latter. The boys were entranced; toes tapped, rulers and pens bounced gently against the edges of the desks. They would gladly have relinquished cricket to listen to more but the bell went and Mr Savidge ejected the discs and released the class.

‘Well done, guys,’ he said. ‘See you whenever.’ And he took up his gazing out of the window.

From the empty classroom, Arlo looked out across the rolling manicured lawn to the plotted and pieced playing fields beyond. He considered that schoolboys in cricket whites at that distance were basically interchangeable with the sheep scattering the North York Moors beyond the school’s grounds. They shared that peculiar characteristic of inactivity interrupted by sudden bouts of gleeful gambolling. But neither sheep nor cricket did much for Arlo. He was more of a dogs and tennis chap. Just then, he quite fancied a knock-around on court. He checked his timetable. He had a couple of hours until he taught the first years but then only the odd half-hour during the rest of the day and no opportunity that evening because he was on prep duty. He gathered his papers and books into the worn leather satchel the boys often teased him about and wandered over towards the main building.

He came across Paul Glasper in the staff room, enjoying a cup of coffee with the illicit luxury of the Sun newspaper. ‘It’s today’s,’ Paul bragged.

‘Who smuggled that in?’ Arlo laughed.

‘One of those blokes doing the electrics in Armstrong House,’ Paul said.

‘There’s a waiting list for it,’ came Nigel Garton’s voice from behind a copy of the Daily Telegraph which better befitted his Head of Physics stature, ‘and I’m next.’

‘You lot are incorrigible,’ said Miranda Oates, enjoying a digestive biscuit and a copy of Heat magazine. Arlo flicked his finger against it. Miranda peered up at him. ‘There’s more world news in this than in that,’ she said, tossing her head in the direction of Paul and the Sun. ‘This is essential reading,’ she smiled. ‘It helps me keep my finger on the zeitgeist. It helps me understand my students.’

‘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 schoolmates but the melody he had created 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 fifteenyear-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.

‘Artemas – 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.