Pillow Talk by Freya North Read Free Book Online

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