She was just an American girl. I knew her when we were at school. I used to hang around at the end of classes, try to leave at the same time as her in the hope of us meeting. In my head maybe we’d arrive at the door together and I’d make an exaggerated show of letting her through first. I’d practised a gesture in case the right circumstances arose that I thought conveyed the right mix of casual nonchalance and chivalry. A half shrug, left palm raised, head inclined, sardonic smile. After you. I had spent a long time on getting the eyebrow raise right. A couple of millimetres out and it just looked a bit leery. Maybe I’d over thought it but I wanted her first impression to be a dizzying sense of sensitivity and strength and, yeah, who am I kidding, sexiness. Later she told me that she mostly had just taken in an overgrown fringe, a brief waft of sandalwood (I was burning a lot of joss sticks at the time), and had assumed that I was having dental work; it was her only way to account for the strange rictus grin I’d managed.
She covered her books in band logos – Hole, Babes In Toyland, Sleater Kinney, a possibly ironic Motley Crue – and I didn’t really think she cared about who held doors for who. She gave the impression that she was used to getting where she wanted to go and so maybe she just figured that doors opened for her anyway. She’d usually be last to leave the class, arguing with the teacher about next term’s reading list (too European, too white, too male) whilst packing away her books in a black, canvas shoulder bag dotted with button badges. The Clash. Janis Joplin. Nina Simone. Angela Davis. I didn’t know it was Angela Davis until she told me about her, at some length, later. Stevie Nicks. There were a lot of Stevie Nicks badges. I knew who she was. My dad was always a bit of a Fleetwood Mac fan so I’d always figured they weren’t that cool. I wasn’t that smart back then but I was smart enough to realise that I should never bring this up with her. By the end she’d taught me a lot of things but chief amongst them was this: there is nobody cooler than Stevie Nicks.
We used to skip RE and sit up on the balcony at the back of the school, up where no-one was supposed to go. Cutting. That’s what she called it. We’re cutting class. Religious Education. Who needs that? It’s not like deification of satin scarfed songstresses was on the syllabus. She could have taught that class. Delivered it as her doctoral thesis. There was more than one time where we’d sit sharing a pair of ear phones listening to Gold Dust Woman in our version of fervent prayer; she always had the right earphone and I took what was left which was, well, left… I could never get her to say ‘bunking off’ or ‘skipping’ without it sounding like she was poking fun at me. Come to think of it I couldn’t get her to say much without it sounding like that but looking back I don’t think there was any malice in it. She didn’t have many friends. I think it must have been hard relocating like that, upheaving geography and culture and adolescence. People found her standoffish I guess, where I saw mystery and romance and the brightest, saddest hazel eyes I’ve ever seen, they saw brashness and heard that direct twang that seemed ever in search of an argument. To me she was always just sure, you know? I thought she knew who she was at a time when I had no idea. Maybe the reality was that she was a bit lonely. I know I was.
She used to like the sound of the traffic. You could hear it from the school, up on the balcony, because we weren’t that far from a couple of main roads. That what you call a Freeway? She was teasing when she said stuff like that but perhaps we did all seem a little small to her. She liked the traffic. Said it reminded her of the sound of the sea, reminded her of home. She probably said ‘the ocean’ rather than ‘the sea’ but I don’t properly remember. It’s funny how the little details separate us but the sense of it was the same: she missed the great, rolling expanse of water that swelled and sang at the shore she used to live by. We couldn’t really compete with that. Landlocked and little. We had a couple of good pubs but I was never convinced I’d get served so I never took her.
Was I in love with her? That’s a hard one. At the time I was kind of obsessed with her and I suppose that’s one definition. It was pure and hard and right and I guess that’s another definition. But love? There was never anything that happened. Well, nothing except one of those intense, deep connections you only really get when you’re seventeen years old and you’re so lost in yourself that when someone else finds you it’s like two dust motes dancing in space that fall into the same orbit. Two atoms colliding. The chances are so infinitesimally tiny that you look on it as some kind of miracle. We were cutting RE so I guess neither of us believed in a higher power but if you’d asked me at the time then I’d have said that it felt like fate. I say we never believed in a higher power: I mean other than Stevie, of course. I guess I was never her Lindsey Buckingham but she was always my Stevie Nicks.
She was just an American girl. Wonder what she’s doing now? I miss her.
42 @ 42 