feel more human. She sends Rob a text to say sorry bout last nite – ta 4 saving me! hope meeting v.g. luv u! p xxx
Spring sunshine filters through the dusty studio windows. Eric looks so comical and sweet. Kitty is stooped in concentration, the cuff sending out dazzles of light as the sun catches it. Gina is beating life into silver by beating the hell out of it, singing along to the radio between clouts from her hammer.
I like this song, Petra hums to herself. She analyses Charlton’s design, sticking the papers to the wall in front of her. She chooses her tools. A sudden thunder of hammering from Gina drowns out the presenter’s rambling and when Gina stops, the next song playing is one she doesn’t know and therefore can’t sing along to.
But Petra knows it.
Instantly, Petra is wide awake and utterly alert, transported back seventeen years, back to school, back to being fifteen. Back to that strange lunch-time after she’d first met Mrs McNeil, when she was serenaded across the packed school hall by a Sixth Former from Milton College. Arlo Savidge.
The song playing just now is “Among the Flowers” and its exquisite melody and gentle lyrics drift out of the communal stereo straight into Petra’s soul.
But it’s not Arlo’s voice. At least, I don’t think it is. In fact, I’m sure it isn’t. His voice is still crystal clear in my memory – though I’m having to rack my brains to remember exactly what he looked like.
Arlo Savidge. I wonder whatever happened to Arlo Savidge. Who would know? I don’t keep in touch with anyone from school and I never heard from or of him after I left. It wasn’t unrequited love – because he never actually asked and so there was never anything I could actually answer and of course nothing ever really happened. But it was love, in its own gentle, quirky way. A love without a kiss, without a single touch, let alone a declaration. More pure, probably, than any physical relationship I’ve had. It was all so beautifully and yearningly unsaid. And yet we only knew each other for just under eighteen months.
I felt as though there was a spotlight on me, during that one song in that one lunch-time at school. As if Arlo had told an invisible lighting technician that there was a girl in the Lower Fifth, milling with her pals in the middle of the crowd and when I sing I’ll be singing to her so can you shine a light and pick her out so she knows. So that she knows how I feel and so that she will feel special.
And his song was the light and I knew all right. I felt it. It was odd and I felt as though I didn’t know where to look, as though I wanted desperately to look away but of course I couldn’t because I was transfixed. I do remember his eyes even though he was over there, up on the stage. It was only later that I knew what colour they were. Blue. Very very blue. His eyes were locked onto mine – even when he closed them with emotion, he’d open them straight into my gaze. He didn’t glance away once, he didn’t look at anyone else and I don’t think I even blinked. And I do remember his lanky physique, his white school shirtsleeves rolled just above his elbows, the lovely strong forearms of his burgeoning masculinity. You could see his muscles delineate according to how passionately his played his guitar. He stood, legs slightly apart but relaxed, one foot tapping the rhythm, lips right against the mike. He had nice hair, I remember at the time thinking he had cool hair – in retrospect, it was nice and cool in that archetypically schoolboy way – just about within the school regulation side of Jim Morrison. Carefully unkempt curls and waves. Sandy rather than blond.
But it wasn’t him as a package that I fancied. In fact, I didn’t ever really fancy Arlo – I bypassed that stage and fell in quiet love. Fancy was too vulgar a reaction to being serenaded. I remember loving him in an instant because he was singing to me, because, somehow, he had written that song for me. And the magic between us must have come from him not knowing he’d written it for me until he saw me that day and me not knowing what it felt like to be at the centre of someone’s world until just then. I think he felt that way too. But I don’t know because he never said and I never asked.
Is she walking all alone
Is she lonely in the flowers.
But this voice, today, is not Arlo’s. It’s his song but it’s not him. Though no doubt his voice will have changed over the intervening seventeen years, it won’t have changed into this. It’ll probably have just deepened a little, lost a slice of its purity, gained a little worldly gravel to its timbre.
Whatever happened to Arlo Savidge?
I remember feeling woozy, a little breathless, that lunchtime. It was so thrilling – me, a Lower Fifth Year, being the focus of a Sixth Former. It was, I suppose, the most romantic thing that anyone has ever done for me. Rob took me to Claridges for my thirty-second birthday in December, but that was ostentation, not romance; we’d only been together a few months. And he bought me a pen from Tiffany for Christmas and red roses on Valentine’s Day. But all of that is relatively easy if you can afford it. Back then, Arlo only had pocket money yet he created something unique and beautiful and precious. And lasting.
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
